• Asus' WS C246M is a workstation motherboard supporting both Core series and Xeon E processors.  (AnandTech)
  
  Includes ECC support, HDMI, DisplayPort, VGA, 8 SATA ports, two gigabit Ethernet ports, 8 SATA ports, audio, and various USB ports of random speeds.
  
  No remote management so it's not so great as a server board, but otherwise pretty good.
  
  
• For some reason, buying a 256GB SanDisk microSD card from Amazon Australia costs as much as buying a 400GB SanDisk microSD card from Amazon US through Amazon Australia.
  
  And Intel's 660p 1TB QLC SSD is US$109 on Amazon but A$275 on Amazon - US$195.
  
  If only there were a global online store with enormous revenues and first-rate inventory management and logistics that could sort this kind of thing out...
  
  
• Uber says what, we're supposed to pay our employees?  Do you have any idea what that would do to our share price?!  (Slate)
  
  Yeah, Slate is garbage, but so is Uber.  It evens out.
  
  
• You too can be the proud owner of a 32-core Arm workstation, perfect for...
  
  Perfect for being a 32-core Arm workstation.
  
  
• Google asks what it means for AI to fail.  (ZDNet)
  
  They could always ask Microsoft, hopefully before Tay decides to invade the Sudetenland.
  
  
• I'm going to try ProxmoxVE.

Social Media News

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• Samsung's Galaxy S10+ goes under the microscope.  (AnandTech)
  
  Executive summary: The US version is great.  The international version, which has Samsung's own Exynos chip rather than the Snapdragon 855, is...  Pretty okay.  The international version suffers not only from inconsistent performance but also worse photography due to the differences between the image processing hardware on the two chips.
  
  
• Sony also has a 10+.  (ZDNet)
  
  The Xperia 10+ has a 6.5" 21:9 2520x1080 display (LCD rather than OLED), 4GB RAM, 64GB flash, microSD slot, USB C, and a headphone jack.  The CPU is a mid-range Snapdragon 636 with four A73 and four A53 cores, putting it two generations behind the A76 found in 2019 flagship phones.
  
  On the other hand, it runs £349 compared to £899 for the cheapest Galaxy S10+.
  
  My Huawei tablet has an A72 CPU, which is equivalent in performance to the A73 but uses more power.  It's not slow, and I wouldn't hesitate to get this or another A73 powered device on that respect, unless you are running seriously heavy apps on your phone.
  
  Another possible upgrade for my ageing Xperia Z Ultra...
  
  
• Apple cancelled its AirPower wireless charging pad because it couldn't make it work.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Wireless charging is easy.  Fast, efficient wireless charging of multiple devices at once is hard, and what Apple found was that the AirPower could double as an electric wok.
  
  
• The SR-71 had its own R2 astromech droid - and it may be relevant again should we fuck things up sufficiently.  (The Drive)
  
  
• How not to create an open-source license, example 462.
  
  Another example.  Well-meaning idiots will get us all killed.
  
  
• How to become a 10x programmer.
  
  Two ways: One, spend a huge amount of time and effort in memory training programs of dubious merit and on memorising API calls that might disappear entirely in six months; or two, create a little personal wiki where you record things you might need to look up again.  A notepad file.  Anything.
  
  
• Oracle has sent out an advisory telling customers not to use Java for anything, ever.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  That's not what they intended, but that's what they did, saying that critical security patches to Java 8, which is still very widely used, would require a paid license after the upcoming patch release in April.

• What if we built a surveillance state and nobody came?  (TechDirt)
  
  Google and Facebook have built massive - and massively intrusive - surveillance systems to monitor everything their users do, for the single purpose of increasing the amount they can charge for ads.
  
  There's an increasing amount of data suggesting that all this, basically, doesn't work, that it's pointless and harmful and enormously expensive.
  

Try Incorporating These Into Your Next D&D Campaign of the Day

Your players will likely kill you, but totally worth it.

Was That "Insert Tab A Into Slot B" or "Insert Tab B Into Slot A" of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 31 2019 03:08 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, March 31 2019 03:27 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 31 2019 03:28 AM (PiXy!)

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• Microsoft's Surface Laptop 2 gets a full review.  (AnandTech)
  
  This is a mid-range system, below the Surface Pro and Surface Book, but above the Surface Go.
  
  It seems expensive for what you get, but then I waited for a 70% off sale before buying my latest laptop so my sense of value for money may be a bit skewed.  But the i7/16GB/512GB model costs twice as much as the Dell Ryzen R7 laptop we got for a co-worker this week.
  
  
• This Dell wireless keyboard just eats batteries.
  
  
• Asus engineers apparently posted their email passwords on GitHub on more than one occasion.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Oops.  If you do anything even slightly important with your email, enable 2FA.
  
  
• Huawei's networking equipment could be backdoored without warning accordng to a British security review.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Although Huawei have provided source code for review, they have not provided any way to validate that the source code matches the binary files they distribute.
  
  
• LAPD reports that their high-tech policing initiative is garbage that does little but infringe upon civil rights.  (TechDirt)
  
  So they're going to keep right on doing it.
  
  
• AMD's next-gen Navi graphics may support dedicated ray tracing - possibly even better than Nvidia's RTX 2080 Ti.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Unless it doesn't or it's not.
  
  
• Office Depot faked malware scans to rip people off on expensive tech support.  (Ars Technica)
  
  They've been fined $35 million, but someone should be in jail over this.
  
  
• The FCC has fined robocallers $200 million in the past four years.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The robocallers have coughed up 0.0003% of the total fines levied, because the FCC lacks statutory authority to enforce such fines.
  
  The FTC meanwhile has collected 8% of the fines it has levied over the same period.
  
  
• How to use Google Sheets as a database.  (codecentric)
  
  Step One: Don't.
  
  
• A four-socket Supermicro server gets put through its paces.  (Serve the Home)
  
  The Intel Xeon Platinum CPUs used here are 12-core parts that cost $7000 each.  Ouch.
  
  Both Intel and AMD will have 48 core CPUs available this year.  Maybe wait for those.

• Google is busy censoring the app store for...  Religion.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
• Instagram is busy censoring commenters for...  Who the hell knows anymore?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Alex Jones is still on Instagram by the way.
  
  
• Australia wants Facebook to censor paid content relating to elections.  (ZDNet)
  
  
• The New York Times ran an op-ed piece accusing teenage gamers of Nazi sympathies.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  Written by an "assistant professor of game studies", a job title that makes minimum wage laws look like a bad idea.
  
  
• Microsoft calls for more online censorship.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  Specifically, they want to use advanced AI to instantly scrub any content depicting real-world violence from the internet.  And once that's done, they plan to turn their attention to "toxic" speech.
  
  Maybe you should ask Tay how well that is likely to work, you fucking retards.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, March 30 2019 12:54 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, March 30 2019 10:45 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 31 2019 02:09 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 31 2019 03:24 AM (PiXy!)

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• Cisco: We fixeded it!
  
  
  
  Testers were using Curl to exploit an open vulnerability in Cisco routers, so Cisco "fixed" it by blocking web requests that identified themselves as coming from Curl.  This is about as effective as trying to stop a pyroclastic flow with a paper sign saying "Volcanoes Keep Out".
  
  
• PyCharm 2019.1 is out.
  
  New features include....  Nothing much, really.  But the previous version was already very good.
  
  
• Samsung's Galaxy A70 is a mid-range phone with a microSD slot.  (AnandTech)
  
  Huge 6.7" 2400x1080 OLED display, unspecified mid-range CPU, 6GB or 8GB RAM and 128GB flash.

• US Rep. Eric "nuke the peasants" Swalwell resubmitted his stupid bill making it a crime to assault journalists.  (TechDirt)
  
  Which is, of course, already a crime, and the bill is blatantly unconstitutional.
  
  
• Netflix submits that ChooseCo are idiots.  (TechDirt)
  
  If you agree, go to page 11.
  
  If you disagree, go to page 94.  Yes, that's the page were you got eaten by a bear the last three times you chose it.
  
  
• Just in case anyone needed a database of 5 million lesbians.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Actually this is kind of serious, since China's government is entirely capable of rounding people up and shipping them off for re-education, for any reason or none at all.
  
  My rule is this: Don't post anything online.  Just don't.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, March 29 2019 02:27 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, March 29 2019 09:03 AM (LMsTt)

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Tech News

• Try our new twitter and bitchute tags, fresh caught every day.
  
  
• Yes, I'm still banned on Twitter.  No response to my appeal.
  
  
• Huawei launched their P30 and P30 Pro phones.  (AnandTech)
  
  These are focused heavily on photography, with a 40MP main camera in both models, an ultrawide camera at 16MP and 20MP on the standard and pro models respectively, and an 8MP telephoto camera with 3x or 5x zoom.
  
  The telephoto camera is the interesting one: It uses a prism to refract light through 90 degrees to give the lens elements enough room.
  
  CPU is a Kirin 980 - Arm A76 - coupled with 6GB or 8GB of RAM.  The base model has a headphone jack and 128GB of storage.  The one real flaw is that it uses Huawei's proprietary nano-flash cards for expansion.  Oh, and their user interface, but you can just install Nova Launcher to fix that.
  
  
• Asus says what, we got hacked, and a million of our laptops too?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Rare triple facepalm.
  
  
• Fire the whole goddamn lot of them.  MEPs who just voted to destroy the internet say oops, we pushed the wrong button.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• Google just made email radically more annoying and probably less secure. (Tech Crunch)
  
  With any luck they'll kill it in six months.
  
  
• 42 is the new 33.  (Quanta)
  
  Now that a solution has been found for 33, 42 is the only number less than 100 that has not either been shown to be the sum of three cubes or proven not to be.
  
  Numberphile did a video just over three years ago discussing the problem.
  
  
  
  And now has a video where they talk to the discoverer of the answer for 33.
  
  
  
  
• UC Browser, which I have never heard of but apparently has 500 million users is dangerously insecure and should be shot on sight  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  
• Everything you didn't want to know about Apples new content platform and couldn't be bothered to ask.  (Six Colors)
  
  
• Discord employs crazy people to censor your speech.  (One Angry Gamer)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, March 28 2019 12:29 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, March 28 2019 12:40 AM (Iwkd4)

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