Tech News

• Terabytes of data are trucking about happily both at home and at work.
  
  
  
• Apropos of nothing, I need 10Gb Ethernet.
  
  
  
• Yes, we have that for all the new servers at work, but the public internet connection is still 1Gb and is the bottleneck right now.
  
  But then, that's all we have on the old servers, so upgrading it on the other end wouldn't help a whole lot.
  
  
  
• Ooh, these things support snapshots per shared folder.  So if I have another accident like I did with Dropbox I can just click a button and restore it all.
  
  Having it per folder is great because some of them will have a lot of churn and others will be static, or just grow steadily.  Snapshots take up no extra room if all you're doing is adding files.  But if you do decide to delete files you'll find that you don't get any disk space back...
  
  
  
• Here's a USB 2.5GbE adaptor getting put through its paces.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Seems to work as advertised.  And the Synology units each have dual 1GbE ports with channel bonding.
  
  Only problem then is an extreme shortage of 2.5GbE switches at PixyLab.
  
  
  
• Another review of the Asus G14 and its Ryzen 9 4900HS.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's Ian Cutress at AnandTech, though, so it's worth reading if you're interested in either this laptop or the chip that powers it.
  
  
  
• Putting Linux to work on the Asus G14.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It, um, did not go terribly well.  The problem is the dual graphics (IGP and Nvidia) aren't properly supported and you end up with the battery life of dedicated graphics and the graphics acceleration of no graphics at all - 2FPS in DOTA2 at the menu.
  
  If you're looking for a Linux laptop, this is probably not the safest bet right now.
  
  
  
• IBM is theatening free COBOL training.  (Input)
  
  Offering.  Offering free COBOL training.  Yes, that's what I meant.
  
  
  
• China's Zhaoxin KaiXian KX-U6780A gets reviewed.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is a joint venture between Via and the Shanghai Municipal Government.  It's an 8 core 64-bit x86 CPU, built on a 16nm process.
  
  It has integrated graphics, but it gets absolutely creamed by a Core i5 7400, so the less said about that the better.
  
  With all eight cores going, it outruns an Athlon 220GE - a dual-core Ryzen APU - by about 8%, while using only 150% more power.
  
  On the other hand, the article presents a long list of benchmarks that the chip runs succesfully - which means that it works and is compatible with Intel and AMD, which is a signficant feat even if performance is basically meh.
  
  And it probably gets more FPS than an Asus Zephyrus G14 runing DOTA2 on Ubuntu 20.04.