• So, I sat down this evening to do my usual little roundup, and before I got the chance to even touch the keyboard, my PC starts playing the "device disconnected" sound on a loop.  Doo doo doo.  Doo doo doo.  Doo doo doo.
  
  This is generally not a good sign.
  
  Turns out my 5TB 2.5" WD drive has gone to meet its maker.  Well, not literally, since I haven't sent it back for repair, but near enough.  It doesn't power on any more.
  
  Taking with it a whole bunch of stuff I can download again from Steam, Humble Bundle, my 1TB Dropbox folder, or the backup drive on my iMac.  But it will take three or four months to get it all back because I'm still stuck on ADSL.
  
  Naturally I had a spare 8TB drive just sitting in a box.
  
  Update: Ah, my Dropbox files were mostly synced to my iMac as well.  That will save me downloading half a terabyte or so.
  
  
• The Dept. of Energy is building a 1.5 exaflop AMD gaming rig.  (AnandTech)
  
  Epyc CPUs and Radeon Instinct GPUs.  It will comprise 100 racks of equipment - which is not all that much - and use 30MW of power - which is.
  
  
• RedHat 8 is out.
  
  After about 97 years.  Sorry, I've already moved to Ubuntu.
  
  The RedHat announcement is vacuous corporate garbage.  The product details page linked from there is vacuous corporate garbage.  The sysadmin technology brief linked from there is also vacuous corporate garbage.  Ugh.  
  
  The operating system is probably just fine, but how many layers do I have to drill through to find any information?
  
  
• Microsoft will ship a real Linux kernel with WSL2.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The current version of Windows Subsystem for Linux uses a translation layer to map Linux kernel calls to Windows calls.  That's why (for example) LMDB crashes on WSL.
  
  WSL2 should perform file operations much faster as well, since the translation layer slows things down even when it doesn't break them.

There is a minor tradition in anime of creating opening credit sequences that are entirely representative of the show but give you no idea what you are about to see.  Hinamatsuri is a fine example.

No indication at all of time-travelling apocalyptic combat cyborgs, and yet there are at least three of them in the first season alone.

Picture of the Day

Things not to buy from vending machines:

• Sushi
• Hard drives
• Kiwi pellets
• Time travelling apocalyptic battle cyborgs

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, May 08 2019 02:36 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, May 08 2019 04:25 AM (Iwkd4)

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