Wednesday, February 27

Geek

Daily News Stuff 27 February 2019

Tech News

  • Oppo also showed off a foldable phoneblet - just a prototype in this case.  (Ars Technica)

    It looks a lot like the Huawei Mate X, with a wraparound screen on the outside and a hand grip thingy.

  • Samsung's Exynos 9820 vs Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855.  (Ars Technica)

    The Galaxy S10 range uses Samsung's own CPU in many parts of the world.  How does it compare?  It's...  Okay.

  • USB 3.2 should show up this year.  (Ars Technica)

    To make things simpler, 5Gbps USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 Gen 1 will be renamed USB 3.2 Gen 1, 10Gbps USB 3.1 Gen 2 will be renamed USB 3.2 Gen 2, and the new 20Gbps standard will be named USB 3.2 Gen 2x2.

    Guys?  USB 5, USB 10, USB 20.

    You're welcome.

  • Supermicro motherboards can host persistent rats in their BMC.  (Tom's Hardware)

    This is one of the reasons everyone doubted that Bloomberg story - if you want to hack servers, it's much simpler to do it in software.

    At the moment the cure is to simply update the BMC firmware before deploying or re-deploying a server.

  • Zero Server.
    It allows you to build your application without worrying about package management or routing. Write your code in a mix of Node.js, React, HTML, MDX, and static files and put them all in a folder.
    Take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.

    Twice.

  • Amazon Personalize is a new AWS API that provides the same recommendation engine used by the Amazon online store.

    Lol.

    Lol.

    Lol.

    Lol.

    The marketing team at my day job asked me to whip up a quick recommendation system.  I gave them a search engine instead, since I wasn't in the market for busywork for a dozen generations of grad students.

  • ASRock Rack's X470D4U is a Ryzen (AM4) server motherboard.

    Yes.  Finally.

    MicroATX form factor, which is fine.  Supports either up to 64GB of RAM, or 64GB RAM modules.  Since it uses unbuffered memory and 64GB unbuffered modules don't exist yet, it's not entirely clear which.

    https://ai.mee.nu/images/ASRackX470D4U.jpg?size=640x&q=95

    6 8 SATA ports, 2 NVMe slots (x4 and x2), 2 + 1 GbE ports (the extra for the BMC module), 2 USB 3.1 ports, and VGA.  Three PCI slots, the first slot with bifurcation support for a riser card.

    A couple of extra SATA ports would have been nice, but still a pretty nice board.  With the upcoming Ryzen 3000 chips this year it will allow a new wave of cheap and very fast servers with ECC memory, and blow Intel out of the water.

    Update: It does have a couple of extra SATA ports.  The spec sheet is a bit confusing.  6 ports off the chipset and two extra ports off an Asmedia controller.  On the board picture (now included) it's much clearer.

  • And then everyone got the clap.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Thunderclap attacks devices with Thunderbolt ports because Thunderbolt directly exposes the internal PCIe bus.  IOMMU is supposed to prevent this, but only MacOS universally supports it and even there it has flaws.

  • SK Hynix detailed its upcoming 16Gb DDR5-6400 memory chips.  (AnandTech)

    Okay, so...  Unless JEDEC have changed things, 6400MT/s is the top speed specified for DDR5, and manufacturers are planning to launch at that speed.  I think something needs to give, guys.

Social Media News

  • China is exporting censorship.  (TechDirt)

    It's cheap, if not quick, to get books printed in China.  Now they're fucking over their printing industry by censoring every page, even for books printed in foreign languages and destined for foreign countries.

  • British regulators call for more regulations.  (TechDirt)

    In this case, they want to regulate social media to prohibit fake news.

    Not, you will note, the actual purveyors of fake news, i.e. politicians.

  • Cloudflare is running a canary farm.  (Tech Crunch)

    Quis canariat ipsos canares?


Detective Pikachu Movie Trailer of the Day




Disclaimer: Pika pika to you too.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:57 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 646 words, total size 7 kb.

1 or USB 3.5, 3.10, 3.20? But then you'd have another generation with USB 4.20 which would cause all sorts of headaches.

Posted by: Anonymous Coward at Wednesday, February 27 2019 11:27 PM (LADmw)

2 Amazon's recommendation engine frequently recommends my own KDP-published books to me.

Posted by: Jay at Thursday, February 28 2019 01:32 AM (mrlXS)

3 I really miss the old recommendation page that exposed the details. The new tile-based system hilariously misclassifies many items (Everyday Life With Monster Girls still shows up in Self Help), but it won't tell me why I have tiles recommending Women's Shoes, Urban Agriculture, and LGBT Books.

And I live in fear of this happening again while someone's looking over my shoulder...

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, February 28 2019 02:13 AM (tgyIO)

4 It's also not particularly clear that to get real USB 3.2--that is, 20Gbps, you have to be running USB-C, because the way it works (and the reason they call it 2x2 instead of 3) is by using both USB3 Tx/Rx pairs, which are each still only rated for 10Gbps.  (And that means you must have a USB 3.1-rated cable.  It's not clear if a 3.0-rated cable can actually handle 10Gbps.)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, February 28 2019 06:54 AM (Iwkd4)

5 Regarding that Asrock mobo:  #1, I love the random layout of the SATA ports.  Instead of populating the pads for all 4 dual-port sockets, they left one of them blank and added a couple upward-facing single sockets (I realize that it's because 2 ports come from an external controller, but in theory you could still route the lines wherever you want; also, why did they skip the 3rd set of pads instead of the 4th one?!), and #2, Tech Report's got a block diagram of the board that shows the M.2 ports are 4x PCIe *2.0* and 2x PCIe 3.0. (The web page you linked says the same thing.)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, February 28 2019 07:02 AM (Iwkd4)

6 There are reasons for those oddities.

The red SATA port supports SATADOM boot devices (it provides both power and data), so it needs a bit of space around it, so that the device doesn't block adjacent ports.

And they needed a couple of PCIe lanes for the extra SATA ports and the BMC module, so they ran short.  Giving PCIe 3.0 x2 and PCIe 2.0 x4 (from the X470 chipset) to the M.2 slots means they both run at the same speed - 2GB per second - instead of one at 4GB and one at just 1GB.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, February 28 2019 08:53 AM (PiXy!)

7 Ok, that makes sense.

I still wonder why they left the third sideways SATA port off the motherboard, and not the fourth.  It's one of those "this bothers my OCD" things.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, February 28 2019 09:16 AM (Iwkd4)

8 Also, that Detective Pikachu trailer is literally laugh-out-loud funny.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, February 28 2019 09:43 AM (Iwkd4)

9 That ASRock board just screams, "build a ZFS server!".

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, February 28 2019 02:06 PM (tgyIO)

10 Yep.  I'd like to see a mini-ITX version though.  Silverstone have some nice mini-ITX cases with 6 hot-swap 2.5" bays.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, February 28 2019 06:32 PM (PiXy!)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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