• Lenovo's Yoga Book C930 is a 1.7 pound mini-notebook with a low-power (Y-series) Core i3 or i5 CPU, 4GB RAM (hopefully there will be options for more), a 2560x1600 screen, and 1920x1080 keyboard.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  No, that's not a typo.  The keyboard is a 1080p e-ink panel with haptic feedback.
  
  Which means...  If you don't like the keyboard layout, you can change it.
  
  I need to buy twelve of these.
  
  
• Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Extreme is the consumer version of their ThinkPad P1 ultralight workstation.  Same specs, essentially - 6 core CPU, up to 64GB RAM, dual M.2 SSDs, 4K screen, GTX 1050Ti - just with the regular versions rather than the Xeon / Quadro editions.  (AnandTech)
  
  US$2991.55 with a 6 core i7-8850, 32GB RAM, a 4K display, 1TB NVMe drive, and a 4GB GTX 1050Ti.  That's not cheap, but that's a lot of power in a compact and portable device.
  
  
• Netgear's Nighthawk XR700 router delivers 802.11ad - and 10G ethernet via an SFP+ port.  (AnandTech)
  
  Seriously, Netgear?  SFP+ rather than 10GBase-T?  On a router aimed at gamers?
  
  
• The next version of Firefox will block tracking cookies by default.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  That will piss Facebook and Google off enormously.  Good.
  
  
• San Francisco apparently has a problem with birdlime.  (Axios)
  
  
• Australia's new national health IT system is a fuckup of unimaginable but entirely predictable proportions.  It would be illegal in most countries.  (ZDNet)
  
  
• I still don't have NBN.  They're too busy screwing things up and wasting money to actually connect anyone.  (ZDNet)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, September 01 2018 01:37 AM (ITnFO)

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• Acer has announced the new Swift 5, a perfectly ordinary-looking 15" notebook.  Quad core Intel 8th generation CPU, up to 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD, 1080p display, and my preferred keyboard layout, with PgUp/PgDn/Home/End at the right.  (AnandTech)
  
  But it weighs 990 grams - just over two pounds.  That's less than half the weight of my 15" Dell laptop.
  
  
• Acer's 13" Swift 3 weighs 1.3kg.  (AnandTech)
  
  Huh?
  
  
• If you need something with a bit more vroom to it, Acer's new Aspire 7 models offer Kaby Lake G, the Intel/AMD hybrid chip with Vega graphics.  (NotebookCheck)
  
  
• Yes, Acer did just have a big product launch, why do you ask?
  
  
• Samsung released their new NVMe Thunderbolt-only external SSD, the X5.  (AnandTech)
  
  It is remarkably ugly and overheats after a couple of minutes of sustained use, reducing performance by 95%, at which point you might as well be running a regular disk drive on a USB 2.0 port.
  
  Avoid.
  
  PCPer's review is more positive and they also tested this $24 NVMe to USB 3.1 adaptor which does surprisingly well.  Of course, it's just an adaptor, and you have to add an M.2 NVMe drive before it does anything at all.
  
  Looks like there are a few of these available now.  The magic word is JMS583, which is the USB 3.1 to NVMe interface chip they all use.
  
  
• TPG and Vodafone are merging in Australia as the consolidation of the hundreds of tiny phone companies and ISPs created by deregulation continues.  (ZDNet)
  
  My NBN connection is now two months late.  And that's after waiting 9 years to get a connection date at all.  No-one in the US is allowed to complain about their ISP unless their dog got run over by a Comcast truck.
  
  
• Lenovo's ThinkStation P520 gets reviewed.  (ServeTheHome)
  
  Industrial design peaked with the SGI O2.  Which I have one of.  In my closet.  It runs at 150MHz.
  
  
• Acer (them again) showed off their Predator X, a dual Xeon workstation that, fully configured, runs into the mid five figures, in a case that looks like it cost fifty bucks on eBay.  AnandTech says, and I quote, "Please No".
  
  
• Looking for a convertible Windows laptop tablet thingy?  Living in Australia?  You can pick up an HP Spectre x2 for $1275 after the secret promo code (which is in bright red banner at the top of the page).  That's with a Core i7 with Iris Plus graphics (with 64MB of eDRAM), 16GB RAM, 512GB NVMe SSD, and a 3000x2000 display.  Dual USB-C connectors (left and right) with charging and DisplayPort support, micro SD and a headphone jack.
  
  It's last year's i7 - 7th generation - and ultra-low-power, so dual rather than quad core.
  
  Only other real strike if it doesn't have my preferred key layout, but it's hard to fit that in a 12" laptop.  Also, it's a few ounces heavier than my old 13" LG UltraPC, but it has four times the memory, four times the storage, a much improved display...  And you can yank off the keyboard and use it as a tablet.  I mean, you can use what's left as a tablet, the keyboard just kind of sits there.
  
  Pen is extra in this package, I think.  $90 option.  But the equivalent Surface Pro model sells from $3299 - without pen or keyboard, and with a slightly lower-resolution screen.
  
  I just went and checked the price again, because the last time I saw pricing like this I had wandered onto Lenovo's US store by mistake.  Nope, it's real.  I think I'm going to have to get one...
  
  
  

• Twitter is recommending people to UNfollow.  That will end well.  (Axios)
  
  
• Two thirds of conservatives polled are aware of the fact that social networks are censoring them.  (Axios)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, August 30 2018 12:42 PM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, August 30 2018 01:20 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, August 30 2018 01:21 PM (PiXy!)

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• What's in a lake?  Intel launches Whiskey Lake and Amber Lake CPUs.  (AnandTech)
  
  These are ultra-low-power (U series) and hyper-low-power (Y series) chips for thin and light and overpriced notebooks, and join Cannon Lake, Coffee Lake, Ice Lake, Kaby Lake, and Skylake in the increasingly crowded Lakes District.
  
  
• Intel's product naming is getting confusing, says Tom's Hardware.
  
  Getting confusing?
  
  
• Speaking of Intel, they are releasing their own Linux distribution - aimed at autonomous vehicles, so with lots of extra verification.  It's based on the existing Clear Linux distro.  (Phoronix)
  
  
• Oppo's new Find X phone has beautiful hardware, terrible software.  (Android Central)
  
  Just ship stock Android, you idiots.
  
  The phone has a 93.8% screen ratio - that is, almost the entire face of the phone is display - and it achieves this with a little motorised pop-up widget holding the sensor array.  The rear camera is available all the time, but for selfies it needs to slide the camera out from behind the screen.  It's a complicated arrangement, but better than a notch.
  
  
• Vocus have plugged in a 40Tb patch cord between Perth and Singapore.  If you've ever tried to use a Singapore-based server from Australia, you'd know that despite the relative proximity it's really no better than going all the way across the Pacific to California.  This might improve things.

• Have you been posting your tweets to your Facebook timeline?  Well, don't look now, but they might be gone.  Not just the feature, but all the prior tweets on the Facebook side, and all the comments on them as well.  (Techcrunch)
  
  Facebook first broke the feature with an API change, then somehow screwed up extra hard and lost all the history too.

Picture of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 29 2018 12:35 PM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, August 29 2018 01:21 PM (+BFHX)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, August 29 2018 01:53 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, August 30 2018 06:05 AM (BcQU4)

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• Friday:

  AMD are getting 7nm parts from both TSMC and Global Foundries, which will give them a full year with a solid fabrication lead on Intel, as well as the advantages of the Zen design.

  Today: Global Foundries stops all 7nm development.  (AnandTech)
  
  AMD likely knew of GloFo's uncertainty well in advance, hence the hedging of their 7nm bets with TSMC.  This probably doesn't affect AMD much, except that lower-tier parts are likely to continue to be produced at 12nm for a while.  The second generation server chips and professional graphics chips were already planned to be fabbed at TSMC.
  
  It might mean a delay - or higher prices - for 12 and 16 core mainstream desktop parts, though, depending on the volume TSMC can produce and how quickly AMD makes inroads into Intel's server market share.  Four Zen dies sold as a 32 core server CPU make AMD a lot more money than if they are sold individually as four desktop CPUs.
  
  So we might just have to struggle onwards with a mere 8 cores until 2020.  Or in my case, two computers with 8 cores each, thanks to Dell's clearance sale on 2017 models.  And the price cut to $399 for the Threadripper 1920X means that those who really need 12 cores can get them.
  
  
• Freesync with an Nvidia graphics card?  Sure, if you have an AMD APU.  (PCPer)
  
  It does add some latency to the frames, but not so much as to make the idea worthless.
  
  
• In line with new emission laws from the EPA, Toyota just set $500 million on fire.  (TechCrunch)
  
  
• Qualcomm either is, or is not, shutting down its server division which doesn't make any servers.  (Fudzilla)
  
  Arm servers are not a thing.  Stop trying to make them a thing.
  
  
• VMware announces Arm support in ESXi (pronounced "esxi").  (ServeTheHome)
  
  Arm servers are the next big thing.
  
  
• Microsoft are pushing Intel CPU updates to AMD systems.  This seems to be harmless on AMD systems, since the patches are ignored, but some Intel users are reporting problems booting after the update.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  On the other hand, that's true after every Windows 10 update.  Guess what I was doing last night?  Well, yes, swearing a lot, but apart from that.
  
  
• I now have a script that syncs the entire mee.nu production environment to my dev environment every day.  Finally!  This is why I bought Rally Vincent, and she's doing a great job.  The trick to getting it working smoothly was rsync --inplace, which allows me to quickly update my database snapshots even though I STILL DON'T HAVE NBN.
  
  

Social Media News

• Facebook and Google want to draft new federal privacy regulations.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  HahahaNO.
  
  
• Mike Masnick reports that internet content moderation isn't politically biased, just hard to do well.  (Techdirt) 
  
  Mike is great.  He's also wrong.  (PJ Media)  
  
  
• Wouldn't it be great if the military had all the money they needed and BuzzFeed had to hold a bake sale?  (WSJ)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 28 2018 11:52 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, August 28 2018 01:01 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, August 28 2018 01:19 PM (BcQU4)

Posted by: benzeen at Tuesday, August 28 2018 01:19 PM (bwzPa)

Posted by: benzeen at Tuesday, August 28 2018 01:22 PM (JpDcM)

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• Like AMD video cards but 4096 shaders just not doing it for you? The new Radeon Pro V340 has 7128 shaders and 32GB of video RAM.  And I think it has a mini DisplayPort output, hard to tell.  (ServeTheHome)
  
  It's not for you, though, it's for datacenters, to deliver virtual GPUs to up to 32 virtual servers at once.  I kind of need one of these, or rather, 1/32 of one.

Video of the Day

Posted by: GreyDuck at Monday, August 27 2018 12:56 AM (rKFiU)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, August 27 2018 03:18 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, August 27 2018 03:22 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, August 28 2018 01:03 PM (PiXy!)

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• Fortnite bypassed Google's play store to avoid paying the 30% fee.
  
  Their alternative installer left your phone open to attack.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  They've fixed it now, but expect similar flaws whenever anyone else does this.  Of course, with iPhones you can't do this at all - which is not an improvement.
  

Social Media News

Music Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 26 2018 02:53 PM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, August 26 2018 04:15 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, August 27 2018 10:23 AM (ITnFO)

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• If you missed that $249 fire sale on 12 core AMD Threadripper at Amazon the 1920X is now officially $399. That's a nice discount over the $649 2920X. (PCGamer)
  
  Intel's 12 core i9-7920X is $999.99 on NewEgg.
  
  
• The strange case of Nickelodeon vs. the Slime Princess. (Techdirt)
  
  
• OpenBSD disabled Intel's hyperthreading by default some time ago. It's looking more and more like this should be widely adopted. Sucks for Intel. But if you're wondering why Intel has been able to deliver better performance than AMD all these years, it is clearly at least partly because they have been cutting corners on the security of their architecture. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• The catch with Amazon Lightsail: Sustained performance is terrible. About 1/3 of Digital Ocean if you're lucky. If your code is busy, you'll be throttled to 1/20th of a core.
  
  So to get the sustained performance of Rally Vincent (a Ryzen 1700) would cost me $800 per month. And if I need that in one VM, well, tough.

Almost as good as dragon tail pic.twitter.com/lbLenaZSbH

— Arby's (@Arbys) September 20, 2017

It’s almost done

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 25, 2018

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, August 25 2018 06:01 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, August 25 2018 06:06 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Kayle at Sunday, August 26 2018 02:31 AM (u9t9j)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, August 26 2018 10:30 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: muon at Tuesday, August 28 2018 01:18 PM (vMYTH)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, August 28 2018 01:22 PM (PiXy!)

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• Never Fear, a new protector is here... pic.twitter.com/ttgfMbJYXS

  — Clive Palmer (@CliveFPalmer) August 24, 2018

  
  

• California is close to passing its own net neutrality legislation. Approved 9-3 by the committee [Even numbers? Idiots.] and on its way to the Assembly. (Ars Technica)
  
  I'm sure the bill is garbage - this is California we're talking about - but voting in garbage legislation and suffering the consequences is what states are for.
  
  
• Intel tried to prevent people benchmarking microcode changes, got yelled at, immediately fixed it. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Dumb move, smart response.
  
  
• Steam's policy on adult-oriented games is a mess. (Techdirt)
  
  Remarkably, Kotaku seems to be on the right side of this debacle. (Kotaku)
  
  
• Apple has booted Facebook's VPN app from their store because it's spyware. (Techdirt)
  
  Yes, it's an official Facebook app. Yes, it's spyware. Don't use it.
  
  
• The DNC was not attacked. The story is wrong. They set up their own phishing page to see if their staff were still falling for it. (Fudzilla)
  
  
• Amazon appears to have deployed their drones to deliver good news to Twitter. (TechCrunch)
  
  This is just weird. Amazon, what are you doing? Don't do that.
  
  
• TSMC is reportedly happy with 7nm and ramping up production - and preparing for 5nm next year. (Guru3d)
  
  Intel expects to release 10nm parts by the end of 2019. Intel's original launch date for 10nm was 2015, so that's a pretty big step backwards. Also, unconfirmed reports are that they've had to also take a step back on the process itself, so it's both late and less technically advanced than Intel had hoped.
  
  Intel's originally planned 10nm process was roughly in line with 7nm from everyone else (the numbers are 83.6% marketing) but now everyone else has 7nm and Intel still doesn't have 10nm, so the point is extremely moot.
  
  AMD are getting 7nm parts from both TSMC and Global Foundries, which will give them a full year with a solid fabrication lead on Intel, as well as the advantages of the Zen design.
  
  
• By pure coincidence AMD's stock is up another 6.65% making it one of the top performers in the S&P 500. (MarketWatch)
  
  
• Netflix tells Apple to go fuck itself and its 30% cut of everything. (Engadget)
  
  Good.
  
  
• Amazon have cut the prices for their Lightsail cloud VMs by 50% in most cases. Prices for Windows servers have been cut by about 30%, and new high-end plans added with 16GB and 32GB of RAM respectively. (ZDNet)
  
  This is a big deal. The mid-tier cloud providers - Digital Ocean, Linode, and Vultr - cut prices last year one after another and left Amazon in the dust, even though Lightsail was much cheaper than Amazon's enterprise-oriented EC2 servers. Now Amazon is competitive again. There are differences in the exact configuration levels - at a given price point, Digital Ocean might offer more CPUs but less bandwidth, or vice-versa - but the basic price tiers all line up.
  
  Amazon offers a much broader range of services than the mid-tier competition, but as a result their platform is painfully complicated. But $5 now gets you a virtual server on Amazon with 1GB RAM and 1 CPU (standard across all the providers), and 40GB of SSD and 2TB bandwidth. Digital Ocean offers 25GB SSD and 1TB bandwidth at $5.
  
  Nodes in India and Australia only get half the bandwidth provided in North America, Europe, and east Asia (Japan, Korea, Singapore), but (a) that's still damn good value, and (b) Digital Ocean doesn't have a datacenter in Australia at all, nor does Linode. Vultr does, but doesn't offer virtual disks outside of their New Jersey location, so it's much less useful.
  
  ...
  
  WAIT. I JUST BOUGHT A NEW COMPUTER SPECIFICALLY TO RUN VIRTUAL MACHINES AND NOW EVERYTHING I NEED IS AVAILABLE FOR A REASONABLE PRICE WITH 15MS PING?!
  
  Really, though, I wanted a second one of these the moment I got the first up and running. And with Lightsail, there's always the chance of something like this:
  
  

  @TheRegister Billshock for some AWS Lightsail users today. Apparently I owe $46 billion!! 😳 pic.twitter.com/K8hK4P0SbS

  — Alec (@alechendry) November 7, 2017
  
  

• Portland is run by idiots.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, August 25 2018 08:57 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, August 25 2018 11:19 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, August 25 2018 12:36 PM (BcQU4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, August 25 2018 01:53 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Saturday, August 25 2018 02:21 PM (3bBAK)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, August 25 2018 02:42 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: GreyDuck at Sunday, August 26 2018 12:45 AM (rKFiU)

Posted by: صيانة سيمنس at Thursday, September 06 2018 08:35 PM (m2gaw)

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