Shut it!
Saturday, November 30
Negotiating The Price Edition
Tech News
- At least they didn't sell themselves cheap: The .org domain sold for $1.135 billion.
Further discussion and links here. (Hacker News)
- AMD's Threadripper 3970X presents a much more uniform memory architecture than the 2990WX, with fewer but faster chip-to-chip links and a central memory controller.
This is good news for Windows users delivering performance generally competitive with Linux. (Phoronix)
Windows is still slowest overall (compared to several flavours of Linux across ten pages of benchmarks) but not by much.
Threadripper was originally a low-cost low-risk play for the workstation market, and it was good enough to create a niche for itself. Threadripper 3 is a much better design and no longer the underdog.
- Your smart TV tracks everything you do. (Washington Post)
That page - you probably don't want to click on it - uses 78 cookies and 195 local storage entries.
- Yes, still slow news time. At least tech news. At least good tech news.
- Oh. MongoDB 4.2 doesn't support Lucene search. MongoDB's SAAS platform based on MongoDB 4.2 supports Lucene search. Unfortunately it would cost us our entire server budget, and we'd have to switch hosting providers.
So I'll be stuck with Elasticsearch for a while yet it seems.
- Was doing some coding in Crystal today. Nothing complicated - a data collector for server monitoring - but I wanted a portable, static binary and I didn't want to use Go.
Good news: Once I got past the obvious errors (mostly compile time errors due to this being the first real Crystal code I've written, plus other things like not calling the right method in my own code) it worked. No weird runtime nonsense, no fussing about with JSON-encoding my hash. It scooped up the server status and squirted it over to the data collector (written in Python).
Good news: The static binary, built on WSL running Ubuntu 18.04, runs just fine on an old CentOS 6 system.
Bad news: It's 5MB stripped. The linker isn't at all smart about removing unused libraries, and when I added the HTTP client library it hauled in a few megabytes of dependencies.
Good news: Still builds in 8 seconds even with all that baggage.
Suddenly Topical Video of the Day
Disclaimer: Just don't let them touch your balls.
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Friday, November 29
Five Parts Turkey Edition
Tech News
- A roundup of T-Rex motherboards. (AnandTech)
At a first glance, my choice would be the ASRock TRX40 Creator. It's one of the cheaper models (though by no means cheap), it's standard ATX size rather than E-ATX or XL-ATX, and it has 10Gbit and 2.5Gbit Ethernet ports and WiFi 6.
- Even the US military is stuck with unrepairable crap. (TechDirt)
- Digital tools that should exist but mostly don't. (Up and to the Right)
Some of these would be easy to build except that building cross-platform UIs is a non-Euclidean nightmare.
- Nim vs. Crystal. (Embark)
It's a short but interesting comparison of the two languages, which have a very similar target audience but have taken very different approaches.
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Thursday, November 28
As God Is My Witness Edition
Tech News
- TikTok removed - and then restored - a video criticising the Chinese government's treatment of Uighurs. (Tech Crunch)
This puts them ahead of Twitter who still have Andy Ngo suspended for tweeting statistics. (The Federalist)
- Speaking of our favourite hobo garage, Twitter is planning to delete any accounts that have been inactive six months or more. (The Verge)
That's not going to cause problems for anyone. No, not at all.
Oh. Belay that. Turns out that even Twitter are not impenetrably stupid and can tell when an elephant has sat on them. (Bleeping Computer)
- Firefox Replay lets you record and play back your web app.
For web developers who spend far too much time wondering what the fuck just happened, this is a godsend.
Only available on Mac right now, for some reason.
- roughViz is a JavaScript library for creating hand-drawn graphs. (GitHub)
It looks pretty good. You can set the roughness level from OCD to second bottle of tequila.
- I think the craziness might level off for a couple of days while everyone eats too much and argues with their relatives.
Video of the Day
Intel's Core i9-10980XE is half the price of its predecessor - and still can't compete.
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Wednesday, November 27
What The Heck Edition
Tech News
- Thirdripper brings with it new motherboards. There's the Gigabyte TRX40 Aorus Master. (Tom's Hardware)
And the ASRock TRX40 Taichi.
Both have 2.5Gbit Ethernet, WiFi, 8 memory slots, and 8 SATA ports. (The tables say four memory slots, but the photos show eight.)
The Gigabyte has three M.2 slots; the ASRock has two on board but comes with a PCIe x16 adaptor card that can take another four. The ASRock also has a single USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 port. It would have had more but the label wouldn't fit.
- More details of the fishy sale of the .org TLD. (TechDirt)
- I guess if .org gets too expensive you could just get a .gov. (Krebs on Security)
Although technically this would be wire fraud and punishable with up to 20 years in prison, so maybe not.
- Australia's Attorney General wants to target social networks with a sort of anti-CDA 230. (TechDirt)
Or... Does he?
He needs to clarify, but he specifically called out a NSW Supreme Court decision holding newspapers responsible as publishers for comments on their Facebook pages. (Sydney Morning Herald)
I'll need to dig into this because (a) I'm not sure TechDirt has the facts straight and (b) this is of absolutely critical importance.
- Xerox is forging ahead with its plan to take over expensive ink manufacturer HP. (Tech Crunch)
They also make some nice laptops.
- Speaking of HP: Some HP SSDs will fail after 32,768 hours online. (Bleeping Computer)
And they didn't find out until it started happening to people. (Reddit)
This is why, even if you have a RAID Z3 array with daily snapshots you still need to do regular backups to a physically separate platform.
And just as I typed that, our primary database server went down.
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Tuesday, November 26
Blame Canada Edition
Tech News
- A deep dive into AMD's Threadripper 3960X and 3970X. (AnandTech)
Conclusion page title: "History is Written By The Victors".
- A shallow dive into Intel's i9-10980XE.
Conclusion page title: "More 14nm+++, No 10nm in Sight".
- The fourth what? Never heard of it. (TechDirt)
Don't buy a Ring video doorbell.
- The EU has told the US not to ban strong encryption. (TechDirt)
Honestly, encryption is far more likely to be banned in Europe than in the US.
- Google has started firing the worst of their idiots. (Venturebeat)
Bite the hand that feeds you often enough and even Google will notice there's something going on.
Google is still run by idiots though. I'm not convinced they woke up to the hand-biting before contracting rabies, mange, and some strange variant of infectious porphyria.
- Intel has launched the 665p, an update to their QLC 660p M.2 SSD. (AnandTech)
These have been out for a while now and there have been no more horror stories than with any SSD, so it looks like they're safe for regular desktop use. The 665p is only about 10% faster than its predecessor, but offers 50% more rated endurance. Whether that's a physical difference or just a more precise characterisation of the NAND flash is not clear.
Anyway, I'm probably going to buy a couple of these, because at least in Australia they're half the price of brand-name TLC SSDs.
Video of the Day
That thing is huge.
Bonus Video of the Day
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Monday, November 25
Groundhog Day Edition
Tech News
- They should announce Groundhog Day 2 and then just re-release Groundhog Day.
- More leaks from China this time detailing some of the technology used to persecute the Uighurs. (Tech Crunch)
This is significant, both because it is getting coverage in a press that is somnambulant to any story that doesn't reflect poorly on Trump, and because leakers in China do not get a ticket to an analyst position on CNN, they get a ticket to Xinjiang.
One way.
Very one way.
- Hulu fell over. (Tech Crunch)
I do like that the article immediately points out that the most likely cause is someone accidentally pushed the wrong code to production. This is the cause of 110% of the world's problems over the past decade.
- ICANN races towards regulatory capture. (The Longest Now)
I would say that they've crossed the finish line and are now doing a victory lap and blowing raspberries at the crowd.
- When Brainfuck is faster than C.
>>,+><[-----------[----------------------[>+<<-[<+>+]>[-]][-]]<[-]>>[<<+>>-]<,+]<[-]<[>>+>+<<<-]>>>[<<<+>>>-]<<+>[<->[>++++++++++<[->-[>+>>]>[+[-<+>]>+>>]<<<<<]>[-]++++++++[<++++++>-]>[<<+>>-]>[<<+>>-]<<]>]<[->>++++++++[<++++++>-]]<[.[-]<]>++++++++++.
- Pika is a JavaScript package registry registry for managing JavaScript package managers.
Or something like that. Kill it with fire.
- Tesla has 200,000 pre-orders for their Cybertruck. (ZDNet)
Frankly, it's kind of growing on me. Not planning to buy one, but it's interesting.
- Ring and Nest security cameras won a "Very Creepy" rating in Mozilla's annual buyer's guide. (Mozilla.org)
But the true stars were Facebook's Portal and the Amazon Echo Show, which were awarded the coveted "Super Creepy" category.
- The 3990WX is on its way unless it isn't. (WCCFTech)
Meanwhile, the 3960X and 3970X are very definitely launching in about two hours.
If you watch certain videos very closely you can already find out how they perform.
Update: The 3990X is official. (AnandTech)
Arriving in 2020. Which, yes, is not very specific.
Video of the Day
Some days it just doesn't pay for Intel to get out of bed.
Bonus Video of the Day
Yes, it's the other major high-end desktop CPU launch of the day.
Disclaimer: Well, I mean, sure, technically they make $200 million per day, but figuratively... Never mind.
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Sunday, November 24
Rey Is Palpatine Edition
Tech News
- Google is killing Cloud Print. (Ars Technica)
Admittedly, this is their core competency. That is, killing products that people like and that simply work.
- The .org TLD got sold off to a private equity firm. (Ars Technica)
Right after ICANN approved the removal of pricing caps.
No corruption here. Nothing to see.
- Walmart is selling an Asus Vivobook for $249. (Tom's Hardware)
The other day I was criticising high-end laptops for only having 1080p screens. At this price point though, 1080p is a selling point. It's a 15.6" IPS model, though I wouldn't expect HDR or DCI-P3 at this price.
CPU is a dual-core Ryzen 3 3200U, with 4GB RAM and a 128GB SSD. That's just enough to be useful, but in a pleasant surprise both memory and storage are user-upgradable. Looks like RAM is 4GB fixed and one DIMM slot for up to 8GB more (though it most likely would work just fine with even a 32GB module).
One USB-C, one USB 3, one USB 2, HDMI, microSD, and a headphone jack.
- 100K page views a month is not much for a static website. (Running in Production)
That's on a $5 server, and mee.nu runs on a $50 server. But mee.nu is fully dynamic and has delivered (life to date) 1,527,342,654 pages.
Uh.
Maybe I should have worked harder to monetise this thing.
- The bus ticket theory of genius. (Paul Graham)
Obsession is necessary but not sufficient.
- Rust won't have a working GUI for twenty years.
- Elon Musk vs. the League of Indignant Astronomers. (Slashdot)
Linking to /. because the original story is on Forbes and their site is just a mess.
SpaceX is planning - among other things - to launch 30,000 internet satellites to blanket the entire planet with fast broadband and blanket the night sky with bright, fast-moving scraps of junk.
The latest episode of The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe had Fraser Cain of Universe Today as a guest and he spoke about this. As an astronomer and space enthusiast he has a love/mild irritation relationship with SpaceX.
Ultimately the solution - if SpaceX succeeds, or even partly succeeds in its goals - is to use the increased launch capacity and greatly reduced costs to put more and better space telescopes into orbit above the endless constellations of internet drones.
Video of the Day
This looks a lot better than season 11.
But still... Here's season 10, which was not a great season (though it has some strong episodes).
And here's the season 9 trailer. This is how you make a trailer.
Or even this, for season 8, which was frankly a bit of a mess:
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Saturday, November 23
Tigger Warning Edition
Tech News
- Why the Cybertruck looks dumb. (Tech Crunch)
The answer actually make some sense. Also, they do the saved-you-a-click themselves so I'll give them that credit and won't say here that it's because it's a unibody truck.
Oops.
- Sacha Baron Cohen is wrong about everything. (TechDirt)
Cohen recently came out in favour of censoring the hell out of everything. Turns out that his premises are false, his reasoning is faulty, and his solution is guaranteed to backfire massively.
ZDNet meanwhile think his ideas are just peachy. There are only two certain things in the world: Taxes and journalists supporting censorship.
- Another ZDNet writer meanwhile blames the tech industry for his own private dementia.
- Google bans political ads containing "false claims". (Ars Technica)
Google is run by idiots.
Memories of the Summer Solstice by ãã£ã‹
- A Chinese spy has defected to Australia and even far-left Melbourne paper The Age is treating it as big news. (Tech Crunch)
The Age and its sister papers are running an exposé on Chinese influence and espionage in Australia starting... Well, it says tomorrow but there's an article right there.
It's odd to see the lefties waking up to the communist threat after 102 years in a coma.
- Pixy's Law of VPNs: If you are using a free VPN, your data is being sold to the highest bidder. If you are using a paid VPN, you data is probably being sold to the highest bidder. (Reddit)
Culprit this time is Private Internet Access. If you've watched Linus Tech Tips videos, they're a major sponsor. Expect scrambling just as we saw last month when the NordVPN hack news came out.
- Microsoft's REST API guidelines aren't complete nonsense. (GitLab)
I love this example of a bad URL:
https://api.contoso.com/EWS/OData/Users('jdoe@microsoft.com')/Folders('AAMkADdiYzI1MjUzLTk4MjQtNDQ1Yy05YjJkLWNlMzMzYmIzNTY0MwAuAAAAAACzMsPHYH6HQoSwfdpDx-2bAQCXhUk6PC1dS7AERFluCgBfAAABo58UAAA=')
I've seen too many APIs like that.
Stingray Bus Stop by Bearbrickjia
- Just click here.
- Microsoft's Edge browser, based on Google's Chrome, has a big red "kick Google in the nuts" button. (ZDNet)
Technically its "tracking prevention" but 25% of what it blocks are Google ads and tracking cookies.
- Scientists may have detected the axion, a particle predicted 40 years ago as a result of quantum chromodynamics. (LiveScience)
Unless they haven't.
- Apple doesn't owe patent troll VirnetX $503 million. (Cult of Mac)
Though the decision hasn't been overturned, just the amount awarded.
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Don't Close That Window Edition
Tech News
- I was drafting this in one window while working on other things, and I closed the window without saving. Blurp.
- Tesla's Cybertruck is here and it looks like the box other Tesla models come in. (Tech Crunch)
- The Radeon 5500 performs within a few FPS of the 580 while using 40% less power. (WCCFTech)
Sounds great for all-in-one systems like the iMac or the Inspiron 27 if Dell ever produces a new version of that which doesn't suck.
- GitLab 12.5 is out and includes, uh, a bunch of stuff. (GitLab)
Mostly stuff I'm not much interested in, but I note that since 11.0 it integrates open-source Slack competitor Mattermost right into the GitLab installer. I probably saw that before but never got around to trying it out.
- If you need a great mini-ITX Ryzen server motherboard, here isn't one for you. (Serve the Home)
The ASRock Rack X570D4I-2T has an X570 chipset, with 4 SO-DIMM slots (and ECC support), 8 SATA ports, two 10GBaseT ports, a separate port for IPMI, one PCIe 4.0 M.2 slot, one PCIE 4.0 x16 slot, and an indeterminate number of USB ports.
There's no picture though because ASRock lost the board.
- Apple's greatest weakness is that their software is crap. (Macworld)
They're not alone in that.
- Apple has deleted all customer ratings and reviews from all product pages on their website. (AppleInsider)
They're not alone in... Wait, no, it was also Apple who lost millions of user reviews from their app store.
Video of the Day
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