Wednesday, June 24
Daily News Stuff 23 June 2020
Transition Edition
I wonder where Amazon is with their series based on Iain M Banks' Culture novels. Haven't heard anything about that in a couple of years.
Transition Edition
Tech News
- Confirmed: Apple is transitioning Macs from whatever the hell architecture they are running this week to something different. (AnandTech)
The first product will be a developer kit - a Mac Mini with the same A12Z chip as the current iPad Pro, 16GB RAM, and a 512GB SSD.
To get the dev kit you have to sign a non-disclosure agreement that forbids any form of public benchmarks, but I expect the leaks to flow pretty freely.
First consumer products are expected this year. Apple will continue to sell Intel systems - and release new ones - through at least 2022.
- Speaking of Arm chips - which Apple carefully avoided doing, referring exclusively to "Apple silicon" - they now run the world's most powerful supercomputer. (Tom's Hardware)
152,064 48-core Fujitsu A64FX CPUs with about 4.5PB of HBM2 RAM.
- France's new online hate speech law has been found unconstitutional. (TechDirt)
They will try again, of course, but for today score one for the good guys.
- President Trump has temporarily suspended H-1B visas. (Tech Crunch)
Sundar Pichai is fuming at having his stream of well-behaved cut-price worker drones cut off. Now he'll have to deal with the output of the American education system.
- Ampere - no, a diferent one - is planning to ship a 128-core Arm CPU next year. (Serve the Home)
With engineering samples before the end of the year. It will be socket-compatible with their current 80-core model.
It will be interesting to see how quickly AMD release a 128-core Epyc part. It certainly won't be this year; on 7nm it won't fit on the existing package. But it's quite possible with TSMC's 5nm, which has just entered volume production. They're not getting much competition from Intel, but Intel is no longer the only player in the server market.
- Dell will start shipping Ubuntu 20.04 on the XPS Developer Edition laptops. (Phoronix)
I haven't tried it on the desktop yet, but I must say I've been impressed with it on the server. Completely stable even on fairly new hardware (Ryzen and Threadripper). There were some issues with 18.04 in the first couple of months, but 20.04 has been solid.
- The New York Times is doing what it does best: Doxxing healthcare professionals.
The reporter claims that using real names is a rule of The Times. And yet they daily run stories based entirely on unnamed sources. (Washington Examiner)
- To be fair, that's not much of a leak. (Bleeping Computer)
Twitter leaked billing data.
For advertisers, since they don't bill users.
To the browser.
That the advertiser was logged in to.
So if you were logged in to a shared computer using your advertiser account, and someone came along afterwards and snooped through the cache files, they could potentially have found something interesting.
It's a good tip for web developers generally, though - to avoid this, useCache-Control: no-storeon any page or API request that returns sensitive data like that.
- Apple also caught up with Android, what, Jellybean? (Six Colors)
You can now customise your iOS home screen. Very slightly.
- Oh, and they also probably announced MacOS 11. (ZDNet)
The big change is that they're making it look and feel more like iOS. MacOS is already a usability disaster on large screens, and this will just make it worse.
Most Important Apple Announcement Video of the Day
Ignore the first 42 seconds. Apple, being Apple, couldn't just put out a trailer. They had to step in it and squish it around. And Apple being Apple, comments are disabled.
Jared Harris is Hari Seldon, which may be a bit disconcerting for fans of Fringe, in which he played a recurring and rather loathesome villain before .
Jared Harris is Hari Seldon, which may be a bit disconcerting for fans of Fringe, in which he played a recurring and rather loathesome villain before .
I wonder where Amazon is with their series based on Iain M Banks' Culture novels. Haven't heard anything about that in a couple of years.
Disclaimer: Always ignore the first 42 seconds.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
01:06 AM
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1
Amazon is also apparently releasing something based on Wheel of Time next year. I'm both curious and terrified of how the SJWs will fuck it up.
Posted by: Will at Wednesday, June 24 2020 01:58 AM (rWZ8Y)
2
They did a solid job with Good Omens. Highly recommended.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 24 2020 02:22 AM (PiXy!)
3
Well, Apple might be a bunch of pretentious dingbats, but culling the x86 port might be a non-bad idea, honestly. Christmas 2011, my wife was given a brand-new ipad2, and I had an epiphany after helping her try to use that ridiculous device: that this was(is) the future of the platform. The 68k and POWER chips (and related OS) were what the platform should have been, and x86 was just a sad attempt to keep that going, but the dimbulb iOS turned out to be where they were really trying to go all along; and that's pretty much always been ARM based. I don't dislike ARM per se, but iOS is the future, Teletubbies. Enjoy.
Posted by: normal at Wednesday, June 24 2020 09:44 AM (+Kfbd)
4
Apple definitely wants to sell iOS and not MacOS. But as someone with work that needs to get done, I loathe iOS.
Chance of me buying a Mac in the next five years has also gone to zero, and will remain zero after than unless the server market goes Arm in a big way - that is, unless I can get Arm servers as readily and cheaply as Ryzen servers right now.
Chance of me buying a Mac in the next five years has also gone to zero, and will remain zero after than unless the server market goes Arm in a big way - that is, unless I can get Arm servers as readily and cheaply as Ryzen servers right now.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 24 2020 01:55 PM (PiXy!)
5
If my software runs, I don't care what the CPU architecture is, but since Apple has proven themselves uninterested in maintaining backward compatibility for long, I consider switching to an ARM Mac as effectively costing at least twice as much as Apple's already-inflated sticker prices.
And since Apple still hasn't shipped a stable, reliable version of Catalina, I expect further ipadification to make things even worse than they are today. To me, it just feels like their solution to poor quality is to reduce the number of platforms they support.
-j
And since Apple still hasn't shipped a stable, reliable version of Catalina, I expect further ipadification to make things even worse than they are today. To me, it just feels like their solution to poor quality is to reduce the number of platforms they support.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, June 24 2020 03:55 PM (ZlYZd)
6
The Twitter approach to quality control: If your system is so deliberately unusable that users can't tell whether a given problem is a mistake or intentional, eventually the bug reports stop.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 24 2020 04:28 PM (PiXy!)
7
Someone on Instapundit complained about how buggy MacOS has been lately, and I was going to reply that it's been stable for me - then remembered that I disabled updates last year.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 24 2020 04:32 PM (PiXy!)
8
Everything after 10.6.8 has been a reluctant upgrade for me. 10.7 dropped PowerPC emulation, 10.8 started pushing their unstable cloud, 10.9 was where they became an Amazon and Google wannabe, 10.10 brought in the iOS re-design team and "handoff" between all your Apple-made devices, 10.11 switched to an unreadable new system font, 10.12 added Apple Pay and the ability to accidentally delete all the files on your desktop through the cloud, 10.13 switched to the still-not-feature-complete iOS-based file system that won't even work on spinning disks, 10.14 started making it even more annoying to use software not purchased from Apple's app store, and 10.15 is still in early public beta.
There are instructions available for getting VMware Workstation on Windows to run a Mac image. Once VMware releases the new version that can run alongside WSL2 (16.0?), I may just pull the plug and keep a stripped-down virtual for legacy stuff, and an old Mini for syncing music to my phone (because I don't use their cloud for that, either).
-j
There are instructions available for getting VMware Workstation on Windows to run a Mac image. Once VMware releases the new version that can run alongside WSL2 (16.0?), I may just pull the plug and keep a stripped-down virtual for legacy stuff, and an old Mini for syncing music to my phone (because I don't use their cloud for that, either).
-j
Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, June 24 2020 11:48 PM (ZlYZd)
9
I wonder how well Windows runs on an late 2015 retina iMac.... I mean, there's nothing wrong with the hardware.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, June 25 2020 12:09 AM (PiXy!)
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