Tuesday, June 23

Geek

Daily News Stuff 22 June 2020

Nano Nano Edition

Tech News

  • Managed to get in to the old server by remote-mounting a recovery CD.... From Australia.  Booting this way is not fast.  It is very not fast.  It's about the same as a x1 CD-ROM drive, and I don't even remember those.

    But I did get in, and I did manually repair the software RAID volume, and then manually repair the LVM structure, and then mount the database filesystem, and then migrate all the data off to a Digital Ocean instance created specifically for that purpose.

    Not directly to the new server, because that would have required me to type in a 4096-bit SSH key.  Can't cut and paste to a VGA-over-IP console.

    Anyway, all the data is recovered and safe, and tomorrow I will continue with restoring all the non-Ace-of-Spades sites.  Fortunately not many of those (and I already did two on the weekend).


  • Also fixed mee.nu, where the MySQL server had gotten itself tied into a knot somehow.  I still can't explain the behaviour - it was doing very little, but both the database and the application were showing sky-high CPU utilisation.

    Restarting the application didn't help.  Restarting the database (which also restarts the application because it shrieks and dies when the database goes away (hi Brickmuppet!)) fixed it right up.


  • Nvidia announced a 250 Watt Ampere.  (AnandTech)

    Pretty sure that's deliberate.

    Anyway, this is a version of their supercomputer module down-clocked slightly and put on a standard PCIe card.  19.5TFLOPs and 40GB of HBM2.  Price not specified.


  • Intel will be using nanoribbon transistors within five years, says Intel.  (AnandTech)

    This is the next technology after GAA - gate all around - which TSMC is introducing with their 3nm node.

    Intel currently still uses 14nm for most of their products.


  • Google Chrome has become spyware.  (Washington Post)


  • So has the Washington Post.  Try this link instead.  (txtify.it)


  • How to install and update WSL2.  (Thurrott.com)

    (Premium article, but if you give Paul your email address you get three premium articles a month.  And he seems like a nice guy.)

    Note that you can't run WSL2 alongside VirtualBox or VMWare.  I'm not sure if you could do that with WSL1, but you definitely can't with WSL2.


  • But then, Epic Games has always been trash.  (Engadget)

    You know you're living through a moral panic when you are not permitted to disagree.


  • Apple could switch to Arm.  (CNN)

    Or not.  Y'know, people who bought Windows PCs back in the day haven't needed to go through any of that shit.

    Just....  All the other shit.


  • Reviewer horrified to discover that a $140 laptop is a $140 laptop.  (Ars Technical)

    It takes TWELVE SECONDS to start Firefox.  TWELVE.  SECONDS.

    On the other hand, no noisy fan.


  • Oxford is entering Phase 3 trials for its coronavirus vaccine.  (MSN)

    This is very good news.  Even though the disease is tapering of in some places, there's no guarantee that immunity is lasting or that it won't return.


Disclaimer: Well, about a 1.3x CD-ROM drive.  Definitely latency-constrained, since my upstream bandwidth is enough for a 24x.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:04 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 518 words, total size 5 kb.

1 <blockquote>"Cookies play a role in user privacy, but a narrow focus on cookies obscures the broader privacy discussion because it’s just one way in which users can be tracked across sites,” said Ben Galbraith, Chrome’s director of product management.</blockquote>
"Goodness," Ben hyperventilated, "if we blocked tracking cookies, sites would just use other methods of tracking you, like web beacons, font fingerprinting, HTML5 canvas render fingerprinting, and so on!  Like Microsoft, we're so huge our army of developers would take years to develop effective means to block those!" before retiring to his fainting couch.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 23 2020 03:15 AM (Iwkd4)

2 Didn't the blockquote tag used to work?

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 23 2020 03:15 AM (Iwkd4)

3 "You know you're living through a moral panic when you are not permitted to disagree."

Apropos of nothing, I notice Engadget doesn't allow comments.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 23 2020 03:44 AM (Iwkd4)

4 You can blockquote using [quote]  [/quote]


HTML tags get escaped automatically.  Unless you used the little HTML button, in which case...  I'll have to check.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, June 23 2020 03:59 AM (PiXy!)

5 I typed it directly into the box.  I'll try to remember to use the []-style next time.  Been a while since I've done it, I guess.
Oh, I started the comment by pasting a quote from the site you linked, and I noticed something weird:  instead of wrapping, it scrolled the text to the right and put in a horizontal scrollbar.  Don't know if that tells you anything.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 23 2020 06:20 AM (Iwkd4)

6 I used to have an old Toshiba 4x SCSI CD-ROM drive.  I almost wish I had saved a dmesg from those days, but I think its bus transfer rate was 5MB/s (this was hooked up to an old 8bit ISA SCSI card that would manage 10MB/s transfers.  Let me tell you how nice it was to get a PCI card that would manage 40MB/s!). I don't know what CD Nx speeds actually indicate in terms of data bandwidth.  I guess I could look it up.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, June 23 2020 07:49 AM (obo9H)

7 Google says that 1x data transfer rate for CDs is 153.6KBps.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, June 23 2020 09:55 AM (Iwkd4)

8 More likely google tells you that data transfer speeds are a social construct.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, June 23 2020 10:24 AM (obo9H)

9 ha!

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, June 24 2020 12:49 AM (Iwkd4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment




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




56kb generated in CPU 0.014, elapsed 0.1501 seconds.
58 queries taking 0.1403 seconds, 354 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.