Ambient Irony

What is that?
It's a duck pond.
Why aren't there any ducks?
I don't know. There's never any ducks.
Then how do you know it's a duck pond?

Wednesday, December 22

Daily News Stuff 22 December 2021

Welcome To The Real World Edition

Top Story

Programmer encounters paperwork, film at eleven. (Hacker News)

Welcome to the real world, kid. Here's a nickel.

Going through this right now at my day job, but I've been there multiple times before so I know this too shall pass, just like a kidney stone.

Tech News

Threadripper Pro 5000 WX is on its way. (Tom's Hardware)

Trailing the Ryzen 5000 family by about 15 months.

Is it finally time to grab that Asus Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WIFI motherboard and build myself a high-end workstation?

No.

Because it's just been EOL'd.
The 4GB Raspberry Pi will be back in stock by the end of... Oh. (Tom's Hardware)

End of next year.
40 million IOPs over 4x100GbE. (Serve the Home)

That's rather a lot.
New patches to the Linux kernel support Ethernet on Yellow Carp. (Phoronix)

Yellow Carp is the codename for Rembrandt. Rembrandt is the codename for the upcoming Ryzen 6000 APU.

It has built-in Ethernet.

So in act do all Ryzen chips, it's mostly just not wired up to pins so you have no way to use it.
Don't update your BIOS. (Bleeping Computer)

Dell this time, but I flinch every time anything I own tries to do a BIOS update. I've been burned before.
800,000 WordPress sites are affected by a critical security issue in a popular SEO plugin. (Bleeping Computer)

SEO is a scam wrapped in a con wrapped in a swindle wrapped in a SQL injection.
The FBI seized $154 million on Bitcoin. (Bleeping Computer)

And in a novel twist, returned it to its rightful owner.
Microsoft has acquired speech recognition company Nuance for $20 billion. (Engadget)

I'm so old I remember when $20 billion was a lot of money.
Stablecoin assets increased from $29 billion at the start of 2021 to $140 billion today. (The Block)

I'm so old I remember when making up fake currencies was considered a bad idea.

March

On March 1, AMD's Genoa server chips would have stuff unless they wouldn't - now pretty much all confirmed by updates to the Linux kernel to support said stuff, WASM everywhere - except it went pretty much nowhere, Alexa had 90,000 ~~friends~~ skills, don't plug your Macbook into a USB-C dock, and Microsoft had a patch for that horrifying NTFS bug.
On March 2, Intel launched their 670p before the 665p even really reached store shelves, no USB-C PD for you, a Pi Pico carrier board with HDMI in software, fried rice was off, and fuck Apple yet again.
On March 3, lots more details on how the Pi Pico generates HDMI signals in software, the Threadripper Pro hit retail, an AMD motherboard with Thunderbolt 4, the Radeon 6700XT arrived, and the US Navy was convicted of piracy.
On March 4, CircuitPython was coming to town, SpaceX's Starship SN10 test flight was a complete succ... oh dear, Mozilla had concerns about India probably because they're racist, 117 patches to Grub on the wall, 117 patches to Grub, a lightweight UI toolkit with a 1.3GB SDK, and ladies and gentlemen please stand for the national anthem.
On March 5, bring your own damn client, eBay banned sales of the six Dr Seuss books removed from publication because fuck you that's why, HTTPWTF, ceci n'est pas une pomme, Google gave your browser cancer, and Kiara from Hololive got her shadowban lifted whereupon YouTube deleted her last two months of content because fuck you that's why.
On March 6, Rocket Lake accidentally arrived and was okay I guess (the Rocket Lake laptop chips came later and are actually pretty good), iMac Pro delenda est, and 30,000 Exchange servers got hacked.
On March 7, Seagate was planning a 100TB hard drive, Solasta: Crown of the Magister was an upcoming D&D game shortly before D&D got woke and went broke - but I'll take a look at it now as it has now released and has a ton of positive reviews, everything you never wanted to know about FFMPEG, and the Ballad of Little Boolean Bobby Drop Tables True.
On March 8, Humble had a Bundle, Hynix shipped 18GB 6400Mbps LPDDR5, there was no serverless, there was just nobody else's servers, how quickly we forget, Dell's XPS 15 still lacked the Four Essential Keys, Google killed Google Pay and replaced it with Google Pay, yes, really and freak bread accidents.
On March 9, Epyc Milan was about to launch - and did, Lunar Lake popped up in Linux kernel patches, Ice Lake Xeons leaked, Google's UI sucks - probably deliberately, and the most efficient way to solve linear equations turned out to be guesswork.
On March 10, Samsung announced the 980 Nothing edition, this was not the bear you were looking for, and there was an RCE in Git.
On March 11, the Xiaomi Mi 11 was a flagship phone priced like a flagship phone, Epic Games sued Apple and Google again, the MGM lion was a paper tiger, and you really shouldn't have been browsing North Korean websites in the first place.
On March 12, our main MongoDB cluster started to go to pieces at my day job - a clear sign of how the year would proceed, the Razer Blade 15 generally sucked, Alder Lake was going to have a lot of PCIe lanes, and looking inside Cooper Lake.
On March 13, Rocket Lake was huge, Stronghold Warlords was more Stronghold than Warlords, SQLite 3.35 could drop columns, there were no adults at Google, and we received a warning and failed to recognise it when OVH's SGB2 datacenter burned to the ground.

And Hololive EN Gen 1 celebrated their halfiversary.

Prism Gen 3, Mooyu, and Nymroot all just celebrated their respective halfiversaries. March was a long long time ago.
On March 14, Apple forced Crabhouse - a game in which you made a house for crabs - to change its name because it might mislead people, threads are better, anyhting mandatory was forbidden, and Apple wisely killed the HomePod.
On March 15, Epyc Milan was here, Nvidia hacked its own drivers, WeLeakInfo did, GitLab fell over, and the LG Gram 17 was a definite if expensive maybe.

On March 16, India was confused but had the right spirit, the new USPS truck looked dumb, Azure Active Directory fell over and not for the last time, and a hidden Epyc Milan gem.
On March 17, Asus showed off a new Thunderbolt 4 expansion card that only worked on motherboards designed specifically with that card in mind making it entirely useless, Rocket Lake actually launched officially after accidenteally leaking out to retail over a week earlier, Apple took up the Google challenge of terrible UI design, and we discovered zombie rap electroswing fusion.
On March 18, the 6700XT reached reviewers and was somewhere between pretty good and amazing depending on stuff, HP spileld the a lake of beans, which one was Van Gogh again, building SMB into the Linux kernel was a bad idea, YouTube only had your back inasmuch as they used it for target practice, and Shapecatcher was Shazam for Unicode.
On March 19, AMD did not artificially limit crypto mining performance, AWS added Lambda to S3 for and actually useful, 19 antiviri classed uTorrent as malware, and Russia threatened to ban Twitter but still hasn't followed through.
On March 20, learn science, go to jail, the PCIe 6.0 spec reached a final draft, interrupts updated, Victoria University deleted every file on every PC on their network, and alkalized water was dangerous bullshit.
On March 21, we got our Pi Picos onto the internet, Asus launched their version of Intel's useless DG1, Alder Lake was going to bring DDR5, PCIe 5, and more fast, Nividia's unhackable rate limited got hacked again, the Surface Duo could double as a 2D 3DS, and Mini-Zork II was released for the Commodore 64.
On March 22, the 32 core 3970X was 75% of a 64 core 3990X because TDP is a thing, the 6700 non-XT leaked but never showed up, fuck systemd, the worst possible case, Backblaze accidentally leaked all yourfilenames to Facebook, and it was millions of spiders.
On March 23, one of the MongoDB nodes at my day job simply dropped dead, a sign of things to come, I set myself up with a Minecraft server, a sign of things not to come, Crystal hit 1.0, MangaDex went very thoroughly offline, and just Windows things.
On March 24, sorr folks, canal's closed - camel out frount should've told ya, Intel is back, baby, said Intel, Google remove ClearURL because fuck you that's why, Reddit hired a known associate of rapists and paedophiles, tried to scrub all mention of her from the site, and then fired her in the space of 24 hours, and then they came for RMS and the FSF, and Cream of Bat Soup or Anthrax Leprosy Pi?
On March 25, Samsung sampled 512GB DDR5 modules, Genshin Impact crossed the billion dollar mark, were you pondering what I was pondering*, and the 11700K was a waste of sand.

* I think so, Brain, but where would we find five hundred gallons of lime jello and a polo pony at this time of night?
On March 26, Qualcomm announced the 780G, with unspeicifed Qualcomm CPU cores because you don't need to know, that ship was still stick, two gigauwus per second, the $69 million 404, and SpaceX dusted itself off and tried again.
On March 27, it was the stupid questioning the stupid in DC, which Epyc CPU is right for Factorio, and in Minecraft I found diamonds before sheep.
On March 28, Dave arrived and was loaded up with the backups from the deceased Theodore, I found sheep, pigs, cows, and chickens, testing the NUC 11 as a tiny server, and Haachama's content returned, though not Haachama herself.
On March 29, Haachama herself returned, there were no Nvidia cards in Australia, that ship got unstuck, I repaired that 12TB MongoDB cluster - or so I thought, octal considered harmful, PHP got hacked, and I had every colour except brown.
On March 30, an RTX 3060 for ants, mining Bitcoin on a Game Boy, the database I just repaired was still work - spoke too soon, we unleashed the Pigz, and there were 30 malicious Docker images on Docker Hbu - downloaded a combined 20 million times.
On March 31, Intel's 11900K was an embarrassment, we found out what mongod --repair did (not much), Arm announced Armv9, Dimgrey Cavefish leaked, TSMC outlined its plans for 4nm, and we didn't yet know the full story of the Ubiquiti hack.

Even More Tech News Video of the Day

Worst Chemical Video of the Day

Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day

Disclaimer: I wasn't even there, nobody saw me, you can't prove anything!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:22 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 1810 words, total size 17 kb.

Tuesday, December 21

Daily News Stuff 21 December 2021

Snowpocalypse Edition

Top Story

Go to Politico's EU website. (Politico)

Or don't, which is probably safer for all concerned, but if you do, take a look at the GDPR cookie popup you get. If you've previously visited the site there's a button at bottom right.

Click on the Site Vendors tab, all the companies the site potentially shares your data with. And start scrolling. Let me know when you're done, I'm going to go take a nap.

...

Done?

Okay. Well, the article itself is about how Facebook is arguing that EU users' data is safe with them and the EU arguing that it is not, but from looking at that popup I can say safely say that data is safer with Facebook than it is with whoever the hell is running things at Politico.
Madeleine from Tucows reached out to us to note that Tucows is still very much alive. The original article included in yesterday's roundup explained that the original download site closed down in January after 27 years but the other parts of the company continued operations, but the roundup truncated those details.

Tech News

The Gigabyte Z690 Aero G doesn't have Thunderbolt. (Tom's Hardware)

Helpful review, because I honestly thought it did. It doesn't have USB4 either. It has one USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 port with DisplayPort alt mode.
Ubisoft is finding it hard to retain staff. (WCCFTech)

Can't imagine why.
Last month we mentioned QOI, a lossless image file format that was almost as efficient as PNG, up to 50 times faster, and much, much simpler to implement.

That last part is probably why in the space of a month it has accumulated 21 implementations including a plugin for Paint.NET. (Phobos Labs)

The specification is a single page.

Good. Simple is good. Simple doesn't include JNDI interfaces in logging libraries.
If you use 9.9.9.9 for DNS that link above might not resolve. Don't know why.
Systemd is not simple. (Phoronix)

Systemd is metastatic.
Employees who don't have to go back to the office don't want to go back to the office. (ZDNet)

No kidding.
Philadelphia woman gives birth in front seat of Tesla on autopilot. (The Guardian)

The combined IQ of the adults in the story and the reporter and the car is barely into the double digits.
Thinking of getting a Raspberry Pi? Good luck, 'cause there ain't none. (The Register)

Not only are distributors out of stock, they don't know when they might have stock.

February

On February 1, the Amazon Telescreen was available in burnt orange, harvest gold, and avocado, for any X build your own X, we lint-picked the MIT license, and Android emulators delivered malware.
On February 2, Perth caught fire during a Bat Flu lockdown which must have been inconvenient, the specs for AMD's Milan server CPUs leaked - accurately as it turned out, Alder Lake-P was on its way - and still is, and the Odroid H2+ had six 2.5Gb Ethernet ports except you couldn't get one and still can't.
On February 3, Huawei's completely new and original mobile operating system still said Android on the info screen, PCIe 5.0 switch chips were sampling, there was a local exploit on all popular versions of Unix, and Big Tech was whining that some politicians wouldn't stay bribed.
On February 4, Google got into a slap fight with Australia, Microsoft made popcorn, AMD shipped a million Ryzen 5000 CPUs which wasn't nearly enough, Sony shipped 4.5 million PlayStation 5s which wasn't nearly enough, and Mass Effect got high resolution textures.
On February 5, Mass Effect edited Miranda's butt, Disqus sucked, Huawei remained on the shitlist, and Haachama taught us how to speak English.
On February 6, Myanmar very sensibly banned all social networks, Intel fire back against Apple's selective benchmarks with their own selective benchmarks, Fujitsu was working on a 1PB tape cartridge, and Apple was the apatosaurus in the room of software immortality. Plus truth in computer advertising.
On February 7, PCIe 5.0 SSDs were due next year and still are, we reverse engineered a 1 bit processor, Iran stopped the Signal, apps in the App Store openly lied, an article about privacy issues set 87 distinct tracking cookies, and the internet was full of crazy people.
On February 8, Google locked the YouTube and Gmail accounts for Terraria and ignored the company's attempts to contact them, Google locked the accounts of one of its own employees and ignored his attempts to contact them, I attempted to make gluten-free donuts and failed, and an Android barcode scanner app with ten million users suddenly turned into malware.

The actresses in these ads are from the pop group Nogizaka46 and can actually play the instruments they are pretending to play. I had a great video of a drum solo but it's disappeared because we can't have nice things.
On February 9, if you needed a 28GBps SSD and couldn't wait for PCIe 5.0 Highpoint had you covered, Tesla bought $1.5 billion worht of Bitcoin, CD Project Red got hacked, Zen 4 could deliver a 40% total performance boost - next year, and we discovered Monkeys R Us.
On Fabruary 10, Haachama from Hololive hit a million subscribers, I had no groceries again, Rocket Lake wouldn't work on existing motherboards - despite fitting into the existing socket, Amazon removed a fashion range from its store after a competitor filed a report saying they contained drugs, and fuck Apple.
On February 11, Amelia from Hololive hit a million subscribers, we compared the Threadripper Pro 399WX to mortal systems, Samsung planned a $17 billion fab for Texas, I air fried baby potateos, Let's Encrypt joined the preppers, what was it with Democrats and fake screenshots, and the Matic blockchain was two million times cheaper than Ethereum. (This has since been corrected.)
On February 12, Cover Corp announced auditions for EN Gen 2 - now known as the Council and a bigger bunch of lovable dorks you can't find anywhere, the Biden administration had plans for stuff, Australia introduced legislation to really annoy Google, everyone had package vulnerabilities, and Audible censored a book on censorship. Also, Apple couldn't figure out how to format a disk:
The problem occurs at the end of the normal installation phase, when presumably the installer is writing hashes up the Merkle tree, with the installer window claiming that thereâ€™s only About a minute remaining. At that stage, Activity Monitor reports that com.apple.MobileSoftwareUpdate.UpdateBrainService is taking lots of CPU, and thereâ€™s sustained and intense disk activity for many minutes. When that finally completes, instead of the Mac restarting from the external disk to complete installation, the installer just quits. Trying to restart from the external disk then results in an error.
On February 13, I predicted you wouldn't be able to get an RTX 3060 - and though it's been a while, I now have two of those, Rocket Lake was on its way, Amazon claimed that state laws didn't apply to them, YouTube shadowbanned everybody, and a Yandex employee was caught selling access to other people's email.
On February 14, the Pimoroni Tiny was an alternative for when the Pi Pico was just too damn large, we remembered that the other person on the tech support call was a human being too - probably, Arm shipped 6.7 billion chips, and 1921 Duesenberg, one careful owner, with original toolkit.

On February 15, the RTX 3060 hit shelves at two to three times MSRP, SELECT * considered harmful, the Pi Pico could output VGA despite having no video hardware at all, and bubble dwellers rose up against reality.
On February 16, YouTube banned Sakura Miko, my router caught fire - literally; I burned myself yanking the power cord, the WD Green SN350 was serviceable but overpriced, Clubhouse was sending your data to China, and the idiots at Bloomberg ran another story claiming that Supermicro motherboards were compromised based on absolutely zero evidence.
On February 17, Coco from Hololive hit a million subscribers despite having her million subscriber stream banned by YouTube, testing the Lenovo Thinkstation P620, Pine64 announced a new Quartz64 SBC, Samsung's new memory chips ran at 1.2TFLOPs, Texas froze over, Adata changed the hardware on their SX8200 Pro SSDs without notification for the third time, and Parler came back online for a few minutes.
On February 18, we were briefly blessed when Facebook blocked Australia, we were sad to note that Google was not planning to block Australia, the Spectre x360 14 had a 3000x2000 display and the Four Essential Keys, Citibank blew half a billion bucks and it was not a blockchain bug, and the CEO of Minds was not a lunatic.
On February 19, Nvidia skorked the 3060, the Aurora A7 had up to seven screens - unusual in a laptop, a leak said that Intel's 12th generation parts would be faster than 11th generation, WhatsApp was owned by Facebook, Photoshop couldn't draw lines, and we discovered indie Indo vtuber Vyolfers, who just just yesterday celebrated the anniversary of her first stream.

This was before the great English-language vtuber explosion, so if HoloEN weren't streaming you had to go hunting for something. Now we have eleven HoloEN girls instead of just five, plus ten in NijisanjiEN, plus thirteen in Prism, which while based in Japan streams almost entirely in English, plus ten in Cyberlive (though I have only found time to watch Lumi). I not only can't keep up with all the content, I can't keep up even with just the content I particularly want to watch.
On February 20, ethicists behaving unethically, 10Gbit/mmÂ², build your own Voodoo 5 6000, and Brave found a bug and had a fix released in under 24 hours.
On February 21, bits fell off Boeings, an expansion board for the Pi Pico turned it into the perfect 1980s home computer, leaks of what turned out to be the M1 Max were mostly accurate, and we bound to localhost:0.
On February 22, Ethereum sucked, we headed off into a Brave New World, liberals got the bullet too, Totalitarianism for Dummies, and we lamented video card pricing that now looks cheap.
On February 23, unexpected technical difficulties with Chinese online platforms, Facebook sadly unblocked Australia, JPEG XL was JPEG 2000 but fixed, JWCC was in retrospect a terrible idea, Concise Encoding was a universal data file format still only available in Go, and a news article got everything wrong.
On February 24, a Chrome extension that blocked Google, a review of console architecture in a lot of depth, Betteridge's Law of Quantum, and the trouble with MinIO was Cassandra, and the other problem with MinIO was their entire business model.
On February 25, AMD was to announce the Radeon 600XT on March 3 which they did, it was expected to sell at double MSRP which it did, and Ubuntu took a chill pill on LTS updates.
On February 26, Redbean was a web server that ran on Windows, Mac, Linux, and BSD using the same binary, semiconductor demand was 130% of supply, the RTX 3060 was pretty good, all we wanted was an edit button, Australia's stupid link tax law passed through Parliament, and the language of technical difficulties was universal. Humanity will one day be saved by everyone on the planet coming together to try to figure out how to operate the Doomsday Machine.
On February 27, don't connect critical industrial control systems directly to the internet you idiots, Dell's water-cooled systems were still noise (reportedly the latest models are better), the Sabrent Rocket Q4 was the fastest 4TB PCIe 4.0 M.2 drive available, YouTube sucked, and we discovered why gluten free chicken nuggets are better than the regular kind.
And on February 28, mining Ethereum on the M1, Redbean got Lua support, meaning it needed only SQLite to become a universal lightweight app server - and I wasn't the only person to note that because it now has exactly that, Lastpass vs. Lastpass, the last of the dumb TVs, and we discovered we discovered a cheap source of vanilla vodka.

Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day

Disclaimer: If I had a nickel for every hit Australian song from the late 70s / early 80s that was about underage sex I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot but it's weird it happened twice.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:33 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 2057 words, total size 18 kb.

Monday, December 20

Daily News Stuff 20 December 2021

Really Saying Something Edition

Top Story

Facebook earned the title of the worst (tech) company of 2021. (WCCFTech)

The survey was conducted by Yahoo Finance which apparently still exists. Whatever the value of the survey, you can immediately tell that the article is worthless garbage because it prominently features prefab "whistleblower" Frances Haugen.

Which is not to say that Facebook doesn't suck, of course.

Tech News

DDR5 vs. DDR4: Is it time to upgrade your RAM? No. (Tom's Hardware)

Short and sweet.
A new AI algorithm can predict, with a fair degree of accuracy, the structure of proteins. (Medium)

Conventional protein folding algorithms are painfully slow. The new algorithm guesses - and gets it right 90% of the time.
exa is a modern replacement for ls. (The Exa Website)

Burn the witch.

It's written in Rust. Which I guess is better than Node.js.
Rails 7 is here. (Ruby on Rails)

Okay.

Better than Node.js. Or PHP.
Fakku - which started out as a pirate site - filed a DMCA takedown notice against TorrentFreak - which reports on pirate sites. (TorrentFreak)

January

On January 1, Farmville joined the bleedin' dawn chorus invisible, Microsoft got breached in the SolarWinds fiasco, I grabbed two SSDNodes servers that I never ended up using but at least they were cheap, a new California law made it legal to punch GrubHub in the face, and we had a Non Non Biyori trailer.
On January 2, the EU pledged "up to" €145 billion to develop next-gen CPUs which so far has resulted in absolutely nothing, my main PC audibly went splut, a backdoor was found in Zyxel enterprise network security hardware, and I made an observation:
If you keep pumping money into the economy, you're going to get inflation. Somewhere. If it's not grocery prices, it's something else.
On January 3, I deployed ZFS at SSDNodes - at about one third the speed of my new server, don't get a TRENDnet 5GbE USB adaptor, ZipFly generated Zip files on the fly, my main PC went splut again - I suspected my new washing machine causing power spikes but it stopped happening by itself, and Ollie was built different.
On January 4, DDR4-5100 was 1% faster than DDR4-4400, URL shorteners tracked everyone, Facebook was bad, and Apple decided not to ban amphetamines.
On January 5, Sydney went into lockdown for the first time over 5 cases of Bat Flu, there were no video cards anywhere, Linus said fuck Intel, there was a new PlayStation game, Ether hit $1000, and China had vanished Alibaba CEO Jack Ma.
On January 6, Jim Keller was named CEO of Tenstorrent, DOXBox-X was DOSBox but more X, Google deadpooled Android Things, Telegram let you triangulate idiots, and a Transpacific Tunnel Hurrah.

(As I edit this I'm listening to Gura, Amelia, Sana, Fauna, Kronii, and Mumei all playing Minecraft together. That's more than the total membership of Hololive EN in January.)
On January 7, Adata, Gigabyte, and MSI were preparing for DDR5-8400 which is still nowhere to be found, AMD's Epyc 7543 kicked Intel to the kerb, Sonnet had a neat eGPU, Hugo Gernsback was naming ASRock motherboards, Microsoft added a newsfeed that everyone hates, and fuck Apple.
On January 8, the SolarWinds debacle unsealed sealed court records, som lunatic got Windows running on an M1 Mac Mini, Facebook removed the likes count, and Blockchain Stalin was at it again.
On January 9, the purge accelerated, fuck Google, Apple,9 Reddit, and Twitter, albeit not necessarily in that order, and when you have a spare moment also Facebook, Shopify, Twitch, Discord, Instagram, YouTube, and CampaignMonitor, Twitter banned the account of Sci-Hub because they were being sued in India, GNAP was the next generation of OAuth and entirely uninteroperable, half the memory in my main PC vanished - another problem that somehow resolved itself, and I added a new YouTube tag.
On January 10, I added a Parler embed tag - waste of time that was, things aged poorly, YouTube influencers were getting paid for genocide apologetics, there were Zen 3 desktop APUs (I just checked and there still are), Chinese corporations bought smaller companies and destroyed their value through incompetence just like western ones, why I'm not going back to Firefox, ever, the tech independence movement kicked off - my new server is located in Australia at an Australian hosting provider - and Section 230 ruined the internet.
On January 11, the Chinese Embassy in US was boasting about how the mass murder of undesirables improved life for the few who remained, Parler was down for a while, HP's Envy 14 had the four essential keys but was otherwise meh, the Threadripper Pro 3995WX got put through its paces, that was a lot of ads, and New Zealand's central bank got hacked and nobody even noticed.
On January 12, I discovered satay chicken, bought an oven, and joined Minds, decentralising the web got harder than ever, the Australian government made the social networks very upset, and Germany and France looked askance at American big tech's growing fascism.
On January 13, Uganda very sensibly banned all social media ahead of an election, AMD launched Zen 3 mobile parts which were mostly Zen 2, Threadripper Pro reached retail, we couldn't have nice things, Nvidia announced the RTX 3060 of which I now have two, Apple fucked child slaves or something like that, Beaker was a dessert topping and a floor wax, Twitter got upset with Uganda and everyone laughed at them, and fuck Godaddy.
On January 14, Pat Gelsinger returned to the CEO role at Intel, Minds didn't entirely suck, TSMC was not going to be producing i3 CPUs for Intel, Microsoft announced Azure for Retail, banking on the fact that retailers loathe Amazon, the security of iOS was hampered by the fact that it wasn't turned on, and Parler redeployed to a new serverless architecture.
On January 15, Samsung announced the Galaxy S21, Twitter got involved in a land war in Africa, Apple's new M1 processor had no documentation, Elon Musk was not giving you $58,000 and how to instantly corrupt an NTFS filesystem.
On January 16, I managed to compile some code, there were a trillion SQLite databases, SSDs maxed out PCIe 4.0, TSMC ramped up its ramp up, Sigmal was expleriemcing tegnical differcultes, WhatsApp postponed stealing customer data, Google kept that right on schedule, BugTraq died, Google stomped on the Minds app, and fascists were busy speaking out against fascism, by which they meant anyone who disagreed with them.
On January 17, Intel cancelled Optane for consumers, Google "accidentally" killed smaller competitors, FreeBSD continued working to eliminate GPL code - in favour of more open licenses, NASA finally tested the SLS booster, and the beatings would continue until morale improved.
On January 18, Pixy had never seen such fuckery, I had no groceries, got video embeds working for Rumble and Lbry, still more ways to instantly corrupt an NTFS filesystem, Google set out to ban third-party cookies and replace them with something only Google could control, we couldn't have nice things again, the strings command had an RCE, and Apple got sued by crazies seeking to force it to ban Telegram.

Also Hololive stars Gura and Marine hit 2 million and 1 million subscribers respectively. That was a long time ago; they are now at 3.6 and 1.7 million.

Korone is also at 1.7 million.
On January 19, I got purged by Twitter - three times, Intel announced its Panther Canyon NUCs (which have since been denounced), and Facebook an Google were making secret deals in smoke-filled rooms.
On January 20, well.
January 20, 2021 -
The press goes back to sleep
After four years
Of moral outrage
At being forced
To pretend
To do their jobs.

Now again they can bask
In the warm praise
Of government apparatchiks
For asking pre-screened questions
Regarding the color
Of the paint
On the presidential plane.

--

Some months later
When everything has gone
Quite predictably
To Hell
The question on every journalist's lips
Is how could the public
Have got all of this
So wrong?
Plus YouTube chat leaked memory like a firehose through a used Kleenex, Samsun announced the 870 EVO range, it turned out that Alibaba CEO Jack Ma might still be partly alive, MeWe added 2.5 million users in a week, Elastic went full fuckbiscuit, a review of the Lenovo ThinkStation P620 (I was just looking at this the other day - I could actually afford one), and Brave added IPFS.
On January 21, Intel started rehiring retirees, Minisforum had a dual network NUC, the Pi Pico cost four bucks and like everything else this year went immediately out of stock, Microsoft continued its trend of being the least sucky big tech company while still sucking, cats and Linux didn't mix, IBM handed out free RHEL licenses to make up for the murdered CentOS, and trust in the media was at a historical low and simultaneously at its highest point for the year.
On January 22, Intel said it was on track with its 7nm process - for 2023, running Elite on a Pi Pico, Amazon told Elastic to get forked, and Twitter was sued for enabling child sex trafficking.
On January 23, Facebook shut down the page of the British Socialist Workers Party and Twitter started suspending Antifa accounts now that they were deemed surplus to requirements, SpaceX lobbed 143 satellites into polar orbit, oh, and PayPal sucked. Just generally sucked.
On January 24, everything about the Pi Pico, RTX 3060s cost more than 3060 Tis, Pip dropped Python 2, the Code of Cancer people were at it again, Softbank ran into minor difficulties with its sale of Arm to Nvidia, and ClF₃.
On January 25, PGM indexes were magic, SonicWall ate its own dogfood and discovered that this was a bad idea, the Tucows download site closed its doors after 27 years, Facebook had no friends, and YouTube marked Haachama's entire channel as safe for children.

Update: Madeleine from Tucows reached out to me to note that while the venerable Tucows download site had closed, the company itself is still very much alive. (Tucows)
On January 26, Stasis mom had it going on, installing an RTX 3090 into an M.2 slot, CollapseOS ran on anything, MeWe's free speech policy needed a little work, and the zombie apocalypse had to be rescheduled.
On January 27, Reddit broke the hedge funds at least for a while, once again we couldn't have nice things, ASRock announced a new mini-PC that you couldn't get, and Google banned the SubStation Alpha subtitle file format from the Play Store.
On January 28, fuck Discord, Jen Psaki was a gender essentialist, Intel's DG1 video cards were useless, all other video cards were out of stock, and AMD announced record sales despite none of its products being purchasable anywhere.
On January 29, we refused to live in our pods and eat our bugs, Personium kept all your data in one safe place so anyone who wanted to steal it only needed to find one exploit, fuck Facebook, port 69 got blocked, Apple escalated its war with Facebook, Google and Apple purged unfavourable app reviews - which were being left on the Robinhood app after they put restrictions on their customers and then blatantly lied about it.
On January 30, 11 million IOPs on consumer SSDs, Microsoft Edge hadn't been ruined yet, Reddit saved AMC theaters, Robinhood relented and allowed its customers to buy one single share in GameStop, and SQLite had a WAL.
And on January 31, the Asus PWS WRX80E-SAGE SE WiFi had a chipset fan, the Intel DG1 was as I mentioned previously completely useless, HTMX looked interesting, and the Excel formula language was Turing-complete.

Party Like it's 1979 Video of the Day

Disclaimer: Only ten shopping days left before 1980.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:22 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 1977 words, total size 18 kb.

Sunday, December 19

Daily News Stuff 19 December 2021

Own Goals R Us Edition

Top Story

Still dithering over what hardware to buy to build out my software lab - so far I have two laptops and two monitors, which is a good starting point. I'll have the money just before Christmas but I have six different possible configurations and I can't afford them all.

So I got a virtualised dedicated server with an Aussie hosting company I've used for a while. I just have a couple of cheap cloud servers with them - about $20 a month combined - but they've been rock solid. And they bill hourly in arrears so if it turned out not to be what I wanted the cost would be negligible.

Turns out it's great. I had it up and running with Ubuntu 20.04 in 30 seconds. I wanted to configure it with 75% of the disk space in ZFS to run LXD, and they have a control panel that lets you do exactly that, without needing a reinstall or manual configuration. Resize, reboot, configure ZFS, done.

Disk is 800GB of mirrored NVMe storage and gets about 1.6GB per second on writes in an actual test, which is just fine.

It's more expensive than US-based options but it's an 8ms ping from my house compared to a 180ms ping even to Los Angeles. It's great.

If I keep it for more than six months and I don't end up using it for any public or shared stuff I might as well have bought a NUC or something like that, but the ease of getting it up and running is hard to beat.

So now I'm getting started on the software side of the software lab and maybe I'll wait for the sales after Christmas before ordering any more hardware.

Tech News

A well-known tech blogger got caught in that Princeton research project that involved thinly-veiled legal threats from fake email accounts to random websites. (Christine.website)

I'd be happy to see this asshole getting sued.

The problem is, you'd have to be able to prove actual damages.

Oh. Well then. Gentlemen (and Christine), call your lawyers.
This isn't tech news but it has to be seen to be believed. The German army, facing fierce criticism for organising a march of soldiers wearing 20th century uniforms and carrying burning torches, played the Don't Mention the War card.

You started it!
No we didn't!
Yes you did! You invaded Poland!
Kolmogorov Complicity. (Slate Star Codex)

Kolmogorov - a Soviet mathematician perhaps best known for his mathematically precise definition of complexity - walked a fine line with Stalin's thugs, mouthing Party platitudes while continuing his research and trying to protect others. He survived the purges by keeping his mouth shut most of the time, though he did publish a paper that indirectly denounced Lysenko.

This 2017 article links to pieces by Scott Aronson and Paul Graham from 2017 and 2004 respectively. Given who was occupying the White House in those particular years I expected the comments to be a dumpster fire, but for the most part, no. Though some of them have proven in retrospect to be hopelessly naive.
Log4j 2.17 is out fixing the bug in 2.16 that fixed the bug in 2.15 that set the world on fire last week. (Bleeping Computer)

Fucking yay.

This one is relatively minor; all it does is kick of an infinite recursion that kills your server.
Putting a lampshade on the new MacBook's idiotic screen notch. (IconFactory)

The Dell Inspiron 16 Plus delivers 92% of the CPU performance of the M1 Max MacBook Pro (and 150% of the GPU performance) for half the price, weighs the same, and does not have an idiotic screen notch.
Wikipedia has booted a team Chinese editors working to push genocide apologetics. (Wikimedia)

They took it a little too far when they physically assaulted other Wikipedia editors. Just posting communist propaganda apparently didn't raise any red flags.

So to speak.
Scripps Memorial Hospital automatically marks everything up by 675%. (MSN)

Something needs to be done about that bullshit. I can go to my eyecare specialist here locally, get a basic test for "free" (we have a specific extra income tax allocated to healthcare, so while it's not free at all, it is at least visible), and pay out of pocket for a retinal exam that isn't covered by the government plan.

Last time I was there they recommended it since I'm past a certain age, but stressed that it was an additional expense. Of 60 bucks.

Lady, you charged me $600 for a new pair of glasses with the high refractive index glass I need for my prescription. I'm not going to quibble about 60 bucks for a test every couple of years that could save my eyesight.

...

I did however get my next pair of glasses from an online store.
Intel is planning to shower top engineers with $1 billion in cash and $1.4 billion in shares next year. (Tom's Hardware)

They already pay pretty well, but it's a fiercely competitive market.

Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day

The meme police they live inside of my chat

The meme police ain't gonna let them do that

The meme police I bonked them all with a bat

Oh nyo...

Disclaimer: Here in my car I have a pool and a bar

It doesn't go very far

To the gallon

But hey.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:04 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 906 words, total size 8 kb.

Saturday, December 18

Daily News Stuff 18 December 2021

Starting Off With A Bang Edition

Top Story

First day of my holiday so naturally I got woken up by an emergency at 4AM because someone misconfigured a new website and overloaded the back-end servers with a flood of queries.

And my main Windows desktop had just updated itself and my terminal emulator had decided that it could no longer run without being updated to the latest release, so that was fun.
The BMJ - British Medical Journal - published an expose of dubious experimental controls at a company contracted by Pfizer to assist in testing their Bat Flu vaccine.

Facebook, as is its wont, "fact checked" this.

The BMJ - which has been published since 1840 and is one of the world's leading medical journals gave them both barrels, reloaded, and is standing at the ready with one eyebrow raised. (BMJ)
Meanwhile researchers at Princeton are running an experiment in which they, uh, threaten legal action against randomly selected subjects. (Free Radical)

These fake threats of legal action potentially open Princeton to real lawsuits. The research was passed by the university's review board which said, and I quote, yeah, whatever. (Princeton)

Good work, idiots.

Tech News

Nvidia has announced the RTX 2050 which is not an RTX 2050. (AnandTech)

It's an RTX 3050 with half the memory bandwidth.

The company also announced the MX550, which is an MX450, and the MX570, which is an RTX 2050, which is as we noted an RTX 3050.

Hope that clears that up.
TSMC has announced their N4X process node - nominal 4nm - optimised for higher clock speeds. (AnandTech)

At least 15% faster than 5nm, which is up to 15% faster than 7nm.

But it won't be available for two years, while N3 - their basic 3nm process - which is up to 15% faster than 5nm, will be shipping in volume next year. Leaving N4X as rather a niche proposition.
Two 8-core Chinese Ryzens are faster than one 6-core American Ryzen. (Tom's Hardware)

Back before the launch of the Zen CPUs, bleeding cash and with their share price at the bottom of the ocean, AMD signed a joint venture deal with Chinese company Rygon, sharing Zen 1 technology but no further updates.

That's what these chips are.
Speaking of weird Chinese stuff, this 25" black-and-white monitor costs about $2500. (Tom's Hardware)

And it can only display 16 shades of grey.

Because it's an E Ink display, like a Kindle but much bigger.

Resolution is 3200x1800 which isn't too bad.
I see it as a win either way.

And it's working.
The US government says it should probably patch that bug thingy soon. (Bleeping Computer)

They'll get right on it.
On the other hand, that's kind of your job.
It's only a tornado - or two - says Amazon (The Verge)

Walk it off you big baby.
It's only your own personal data. Why should you be permitted access, asks Google. (TechRadar)

Content that Google in its infinite wisdom deems "misleading" may be locked without notice.

Content on Google Drive.

Not on their social network, because they don't have one. On their file storage.

There is no cloud, there's just other people's computers. And they're probably communists.
Adobe's share price plunged 10% after announcing sales growth of 20%. (CNBC)

This is due to investor concerns over inflation and interest rates, which I am reliably informed are a transitory issue and everything is going great and we are definitely not "fucked beyond any possibility of redemption".
US schools are cancelling classes over TikTok. (The Verge)

At some point you might begin to suspect that teachers aren't actually interested in, you know, teaching.
Verizon, caught spying on its customers, forcibly opted those customers into the spying program and sent them an email thanking them for their participation. (The Verge)

Thank you for your generous contribution of $1000 to the Hobos United Benevolent Fund. This payment will be taken automatically from your account. You can opt out of this at any time by clicking on this link.
Amazon partnered with China to boost the country's booming historical revisionism and genocide apologetics industry. (Reuters)

Nice one, Jeff.
US regulators are taking a look at the booming "buy now, pay later, definitely no interest or fees ha ha" industry. (CNN)

In fairness this industry is only marginally less ethical than the one mentioned above.
US regulators also flagged stablecoins as a systemic risk to the economy. (Reuters)

This came in at #4, after inflation, interest rates, and US regulators.
Scientists have discovered a millipede. (The Guardian)

Specifically the Australian creepy-crawly has 1306 legs, the first species discovered that truly has over 1000.
A thousand-dollar iPhone lost to a $400 Google Pixel in blind camera tests. (9 to 5 Mac)

Aren't blind camera tests basically random?
Dutch authorities have banned anti-5G "negative ion" pendants for being insufficiently fake. (The Register)

They really do generate negative ions.

Because they are radioactive.

Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day

Nice Moog.

Update: JROD over at Ace of Spades pointed me to this version with NIN.

Disclaimer: Remember folks, it's the holiday season, so this blog is issuing double demerits for anyone mentioned in these news roundups. Don't take the risk of being a corporate communist. It's not worth it. We accept bribes by cash, direct deposit, and most major cryptocurrencies.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:10 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 897 words, total size 10 kb.

1 There's a special level of Hell for employers that contact people who are on holiday/vacation for some work related problem.
I hope they're adding 2 days onto your holiday for the one day they had to call you in.

Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant at Saturday, December 18 2021 06:36 PM (nRMeC)

2 The end result of that would just be me working seven days a week while piling up infinite annual leave.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, December 19 2021 12:45 PM (PiXy!)

3 Now hold on a minute, and let's think this out. All you have to do is make sure you can cash your leave in, and then quit when you have enough money to retire.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, December 19 2021 01:36 PM (Z0GF0)

4 For some reason, Princeton appears to see what the University of Minnesota did with Linux and decided that rather than being an example of what not to do, Minnesota's study was something that should be replicated in other fields.

For some reason, the copy of Firefox I was using that I have been careful not to update...Decided to update for me. I hope Brave (Or if anyone else has another browser in mind.) does not do that, because this is the final nudge I need to jettison Firefox completely.

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, December 19 2021 02:17 PM (MuaLM)

All you have to do is make sure you can cash your leave in, and then quit when you have enough money to retire.

The impossibility of me ever actually taking leave combined with my employer being good about things like cashing out accrued leave is why I can suddenly build my dream computer lab.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, December 19 2021 05:53 PM (PiXy!)

6 Dear cxt217,

The only way that I know to completely prevent brave/firefox/chromium from updating is to run a gentoo chroot with version locks in your package.mask (and very likely your package.unmask as well). As far as I know, there's no way to prevent automatic updates in windows, and it's very difficult to prevent inadvertant updates in most linux distros.
FreeBSD can also manage the trick, but it's not as easy to run as a service under windows. And the graphics and wireless support aren't "up-to-date" enough, really to run FreeBSD on your laptop, unless your laptop is pretty old.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, December 19 2021 11:06 PM (obo9H)

7 Normal - I bought an old desktop(WIN7) to run some old games I enjoy, that was apparently used in some business. No games, and locked down very tight. I get pop-up messages asking me to enable MS updates. I ignore them and only pull down the updates that I want.
Don't know if it because it's an older Windows system or not, but apparently it USED to be possible to shut down auto-updates. Makes me wonder what business used to use this one.

Posted by: Frank at Monday, December 20 2021 09:46 AM (rglbH)

8 "it USED to be possible to shut down auto-updates"
It did. And Microsoft got tired of being constantly yelled at because of all the people who never updated their systems and got malware, and they looked at Android and Apple phones auto-updating and just said "that's for us."
They were gonna get endless hate either way, but this causes fewer security problems.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 20 2021 10:55 AM (Z0GF0)

9 Pale Moon and Vivaldi seem to be possible to prevent from updating.

MS operating system, with windows 10 it is possible to pause updates for 35 days.

Hate to say it, but I've shifted a lot of my "doesn't work in pale moon, and need it for business" websites to Edge.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, December 20 2021 11:41 AM (r9O5h)

10 Linux Mint allows you to turn off automatic updates, including for third party repos registered in Apt and for flatpak. So not updating browsers wouldn't be that hard. To prevent accidental updates, you could blacklist a browser version until you are ready to update, though you would have to do this for every version. They did add in nag notices, but after significant pushback gave a decent amount of granularity in setting their frequency and ability to limit to which ones go out.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Thursday, December 23 2021 01:29 AM (iXREa)

11 I was trying to refer to just the browser updates. Most of them automatically check and update unless you change a setting or two hidden deep within the bowels of the menus. Brave in particular, runs a background service on windows that updates even if you don't open brave. I'm not aware of any setting that will stop it either.

You can always compile vimb yourself, if you like to have fun! Or use lynx.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, December 23 2021 04:16 AM (LADmw)

12 "Brave in particular, runs a background service on windows that updates even if you don't open brave. I'm not aware of any setting that will stop it either."
Delete the task from Scheduled Tasks? I usually do that periodically. Chrome doesn't need to check for updates every frickin' hour.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, December 23 2021 07:51 AM (oPg+d)

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Friday, December 17

Daily News Stuff 17 December 2021

Onwards To The Eighties Edition

Top Story

So I technically survived the last working day of the year and I'm technically on leave for three weeks. In reality I'll be logging in on Monday to do a few things - but I won't be answering phone calls or attending meetings. Those alone make it a holiday.
Lumi arrived, or possibly Pomu. Anyway, the second of my Dell Inspiron 16 Plus laptops. I might get a third one of these - I'm using them as compact, portable servers with a built-in UPS, which is why I need more than one of them.

The specific model I've been buying isn't 40% off right now so any potential purchases will wait until that sale comes around again.
Ethereum costs $250 per second and is 5000 times slower than a Raspberry Pi costing $45. (Usenix)

It has a data transfer rate about as fast as a 19.2k modem and storage costs that would turn a 1960 IBM account manager green with envy.

And it doesn't even work consistently.

Tech News

Merry Christmas! You've been hacked! Here's a bill for $45,000! (Tom's Hardware)

Just what I wanted! How did you guess?
I'm not sure who the imagined market is for a $2600 audiophile network switch. (Tom's Hardware)

Audiophiles want tube amplifiers and laser turntable pickups. They don't stream from Spotify.
A reader also forwarded this audiophile SSD. (AudiophileStyle)

This one does have one valid function: 100% of the TLC flash is locked in pseudo-SLC mode, making for more consistent write speeds. Though any SSD these days is a thousand times faster than is needed for audio recording and playback, even if you're using 192kHz and 32 bits.
Next-level Zenloss:A new strain of ransomware specifically targets Minecraft servers. (Bleeping Computer)

Ha. My Minecraft server runs in a container and the host takes a snapshot every twenty minutes.

And keeps it.

Forever.

Thousands of the damn things.

I really should clean that up.

(I think zenloss is a Hololive term, and mostly relates to Minecraft, which is rather nasty about deleting all your items if you die and don't make it back to your place of death in five minutes.)
Log4j attackers otherwise are switching to mining Monero. (Bleeping Computer)

That's the same thing that happened in that $45,000 AWS account breach above - the hackers used the account to mine Monero, earning themselves $800 at a cost of $45,000. So yes, it's 50 times less painful to just have your wallet stolen.
Fossil fuels kill a million people a year. (Ars Technica)

Sort of. Shorten lifespans to that effect, anyway.

Mostly coal.

Mostly China.

If you've seen a major Chinese city on a bad air day this is entirely believable.
So burn wood instead. (New Yorker)

It's technically renewable so the EU will shower you with subsidies even though it makes no fucking sense.

If the system is stupid you might as well take advantage of it.
At EA it can take a day to change a three lines of code. (Neowin)

Or rather - the article is kind of dumb - it takes five minutes to make the change and the rest of the day to test the effects throughout the game.
Crypto investors were cheated out of $8 billion in 2021. (The Register)

Still less than civil asset forfeiture.
Is China going backwards to Mao or sideways to Pol Pot? (The Register)

The Chinese government has issued a new list of things you're not allowed to say in video streams, including:

1. Suggesting socialism is anything but perfect.
2. Suggesting Marxism is anything but perfect.
3. Suggesting the CCP is anything but perfect.
4. Suggesting that maybe things are going in the wrong direction.
5. Suggesting that the CCP has at any time in history been anything but perfect.
6. Suggesting that shoving people into an unmarked van at 3AM never to be seen again might not be the most perfectly ethical way to behave.
7. Making jokes about the CCP.
8. Pointing out that Taiwan is a country that exists.
9. Mentioning the independence movements in Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang, or basically anywhere else on the planet the CCP considers their property.
10. Reporting on any foreign news that reports on any of that or mentions Taiwan as a country that exists.
11. History.
12. Making jokes about China.
13. Making jokes about the Chinese flag.
14. Making jokes about the Chinese national anthem.
15. Factual reporting about what Chinese leaders actually said.
16. Cosplaying as any Chinese leader.
17. Wearing funny hats.
18. Pointing out that that Mao guy kinda sucked.
...
100. Anything else the CCP doesn't like.

Yes, the list has exactly 100 rules, and yes, that's the last one.

Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day

That doesn't really sound like a 70s song, and that's because it ain't.

1962.

Disclaimer: And now the maple syrup is very sticky,

The stuff is on the pancakes now,

That ought to make them stick together.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:30 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 841 words, total size 8 kb.

1 What did environmentalists use to light their houses before candles?

Electricity.

Posted by: normal at Friday, December 17 2021 10:46 PM (obo9H)

2 That NVMe drive is hilarious. External power, giant filtering caps, an external crystal, 333GB, and...a Realtek controller with a PCIe 3.0 x2 interface and 4 NAND channels. Well, I guess they needed to cut corners somewhere.
Also: "I only would have used a different power connector because it total height. It wouldnâ€™t fit in my case, I only have have about 5mm or so."
Yeah, no kidding. A lot of motherboards have *no* clearance, like mine, which has heatsinks for both drives it supports. You literally couldn't even use this as your main drive, the one connected to the CPU, because that one you can't even remove the heatsink (there isn't one), because the drive sits upside down on a daughterboard, floating above the motherboard!
To be fair, you probably wouldn't *want* to use it as your primary drive, because of the size, interface, and you'd probably not want to share bandwidth with OS activity.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, December 18 2021 12:23 AM (Z0GF0)

3 "Minecraft, which is rather nasty about deleting all your items if you die and don't make it back to your place of death in five minutes"
There are mods that will eliminate that problem by dropping a grave container with all your stuff where you died.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, December 18 2021 12:25 AM (Z0GF0)

4 Audiophiles, way beyond the old Laser Pickup for vinyl. Now days they argue endlessly about which USB cable sounds better with the Kilobuck DAC.
Then there are the Power Cable threads, Ugh!.

Posted by: Mark Gosdin at Saturday, December 18 2021 12:30 AM (FKpVG)

5 Dear People,
I've been experimenting recently with turning a two channel MP3 into a time series, and downsampling the results. I think I can hear a difference between the 11k sampling frequency result and the 22k sampling frequency result.

I'm worried I'm turning into an audiophile. Help! Please.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, December 18 2021 02:19 AM (r9O5h)

6 Pat,
have you discovered any desire to buy vastly-overpriced cables or other equipment? If not, you're probably safe, but better to destroy anything in the vicinity with a speaker to avoid contamination.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, December 18 2021 03:31 AM (Z0GF0)

7 If you are grinding off bits of sound, it seems like you've used an audio file on your audio file.

Posted by: benzeen at Saturday, December 18 2021 04:31 AM (/p5qM)

8 Well, the type of electronics I'm really interested in, the analog signal quality often really does matter, and equipment can get quite expensive. It is actually a little bit justified, because these systems are stupidly hard to make work at all, and the consumer digital electronics world does not supply components that are good for the high power applications. Hobbyist grade systems are basically for low power applications only.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, December 18 2021 04:43 AM (r9O5h)

9 Noticed something odd about the pagination thing on the bottom of my blog. It says Page 1 of 1 on the first page, and then Page 2 of 2 on the next, and so on.

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, December 18 2021 04:30 PM (Ix1l6)

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Thursday, December 16

Daily News Stuff 16 December 2021

Fried Green Potatoes Edition

Top Story

The great thing about working in the crypto field is that no matter how badly you screw up there are thousands of people working tirelessly to put your mistake into perspective. (Mashable)

Coinbase had a "display issue" that made thousands of customers into instant billionaires - on screen, anyway.

Tech News

Why would people believe this? Well, many didn't.

But on the other hand, this sort of nonsense actually happens for real. (The Information)

Early backers of the Solana blockchain are cashing out after making a 430,000% return on their investment.

If that sounds unsustainable that's because it is.
A Japanese startup has shown off a working 7-bit NAND flash cell. (AnandTech)

Working as in actually working and not losing your data after three seconds, which is what you'd expect from 7LC. They use a new cell design to achieve this workingness.

Downside is that the cells are bigger than regular TLC or QLC, so the gain in device density is basically nil.
Hynix is sampling 24Gbit DDR5 RAM. (AnandTech)

The DRAM industry isn't ready yet to ship 32Gbit chips, so the DDR5 spec was designed to permit an intermediate size of 24Gbit instead of the usual doubling. This means that any DDR5 CPU that properly follows the spec will be able to support 192GB of RAM instead of 128GB as soon as these ship - or 96GB on a typical laptop.
If you want a 10Gb Ethernet interface but don't have a free PCIe slot you can plug it into an M.2 slot instead which is great but kind of pointless because now your Ethernet port is on the inside of your computer. (Tom's Hardware)
The 12GB RTX 3080 that Nvidia may or may not be announcing will be 3% faster than the 10GB model. (WCCFTech)

Okay.
Unix command line like it's 1979 article of the day. (Dan Luu)

In 1979 the tar command (used for backups - it's short for tape archive) had 12 command line options. As of 2017 it had 139.

ps (used to show programs running on a Unix system) had 4 options in 1979. It now has 85.

Maybe do a little less of this?
Microsoft's Azure Active Directory service apparently had a bad day.

The internet did not implode.

Good luck finding an outage on this status page. (Azure)

Though maybe they push things to the top if there's an outage. Right now every single Azure service around the world appears to be working properly.
IBM has announced a new transistor design that could reduce power consumption by up to 85%. (IBM)

It's also smaller than regular finFET transistors manufactured at a given process node.

Since power consumption is the limiting factor for large chips like CPUs and GPUs this would be a huge win.
QNAP has a 16 port 25GbE desktop switch. (Serve the Home)

I'm looking at getting a QNAP 8 port 2.5GbE desktop switch, so this one is only 20 times faster than that.
ZDNet has a - what's the term? - advertorial for Degoo cloud storage. (ZDNet)

You may be wondering what the hell is Degoo, or you may think that it's the stuff that removes the sticky residue left behind when you peel a label off a new appliance.

It's nothing so useful. (Cloud Storage Info)

Pros: Cheap
Cons: Doesn't fucking work
New York City is banning natural gas. (CNBC)

They'll be forcing new construction to use electric heating instead.

Which in New York mostly comes from natural gas.

Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day

The audio on that clip isn't wonderful, so here's the studio version as well.

I was running low on 1979 songs that I actually like, then I took a look at the Australian charts for 1979, and I was like, oh, right, that one, and that one, and that one... And we're good through the end of the year at least.

Disclaimer: If you leave me, can I come too?

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Post contains 671 words, total size 7 kb.

Wednesday, December 15

Daily News Stuff 15 December 2021

A Starlab Is Born Edition

Top Story

The patched version of Log4j was still unsafe. (LunaSec)

Go patch your patches.
Half of corporate networks have been targeted for this vulnerability. (ZDNet)

The other half don't have the necessary auditing to know they have been targeted.

Tech News

Two trees good, four trees better, say scientists. (Phys.org)

Plant plants, they suggest.
The Dell Luna laptop is repairable and upgradeable and for some reason boxier than a 70s Volvo station wagon and an extremely unattractive shade of grey. (The Verge)

Acer also has a repairable, environmentally friendly laptop range, and they are also boxy and ugly.
Nvidia's rumoured 16GB 3070 Ti and 12GB 3080 that were rumoured to be scheduled to be announced this week are now rumoured to not. (WCCFTech)

Unless they are. Who knows?

Party Like It's Schadenfreude All the Way Down Video of the Day

Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day

Disclaimer: Well owl bee.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:39 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 164 words, total size 2 kb.

1 The Hololive sings Country video is marked as "private" and thus can't be viewed. (Check it on a computer you're not signed into YT/Google on.)

Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant at Wednesday, December 15 2021 10:30 PM (nRMeC)

2 Ah, it's over. I'll remove it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, December 16 2021 12:02 AM (PiXy!)

3 It was an unarchived live stream, but fun while it lasted.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, December 16 2021 12:03 AM (PiXy!)

4 It will come, no doubt, as no surprise that Other Fredo disagrees with the decision that he should return the money.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, December 16 2021 12:18 AM (Z0GF0)

5 Those scientists are bullshit.

The way moderns and environmentalists do forestry in the US involves letting stuff build up until even the trees that would normally survive fires will burn down.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, December 16 2021 01:49 AM (r9O5h)

6 In fairness to the marxist ideologues pasing as scientists, trees actually are a carbon sink. Not that this has any effect on "climate change", but I'm not really here to discuss satanic religions. Also, we have more trees in the US now than when the pilgrims landed.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, December 16 2021 02:23 AM (LADmw)

7 Best way to use trees as a carbon sink is to grow them, cut them down, and build stuff out of them. Those guys can't quite make it past step one though.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, December 16 2021 03:16 AM (PiXy!)

8 "Other ideas in Concept Luna are more focused on the climate impact of electronics. The aluminum in the chassis is smelted using hydropower energy, replacing what is often one of the dirtiest manufacturing steps with a low-carbon alternative."

Alumi[n[i]]um refining has pretty much been associated with hydropower since the first large-scale refinery opened near the Niagara hydropower plant in 1895, so I'm not really sure what they're bragging about here.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, December 16 2021 07:47 AM (obo9H)

9 Electricity, like money, is fungible. Once on the grid, current is current. But it has become the trend lately to perform logical twists, with the support of your local utility, saying "sure, I'm drawing anonymous electrons from the grid, which may very well have been charged from the nasty coal plant over there. But I've communicated my desire to be green to the utility, and paid them a small premium, so they promise me that no, my 10 gigawatt hours per year of current is allocated from the hydropower plant at the other end of the grid that produces 30 gw/hours per year, and it's other dirty consumers using the 40 gigawatt hours produced by the coal plant."
We will ignore that several such utilities have been caught over-subscribing consumers to these programs, and promising many more gw hours of clean hydropower than the plant is capable of producing...

Posted by: David at Thursday, December 16 2021 11:12 AM (t/97R)

10 At a household level, electricity might be fungible, but when you're pulling a few MW, you might have to think about where you build your plant.

Posted by: normal at Friday, December 17 2021 03:41 AM (LADmw)

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Tuesday, December 14

Daily News Stuff 14 December 2021

Crises Diverted Edition

Top Story

News continues to be quiet, which reminds me of what I did this time last year.

And I'll do it again if you're not careful.

Only one of the videos in the December 31 post is dead, and I know which it is, and I think there's an alternate source.
Open source is not broken. (Nadh.in)

The argument is not wrong in itself but it doesn't really address the claim. The author is trying to say that just because the cause of open source software's breakage is outside of open source that open source is not broken, but that's nonsense.

It's important to identify the cause, but it's just as important to recognise the wreckage.

(This is in response to an earlier article in response to the Log4j debacle.)

Tech News

AMD Navi 12 crypto mining cards are on sale in China. (Tom's Hardware)
Where crypto miners face prosecution, and likely persecution, by the country's consistently dictatorial and increasingly Marxist government. (Coindesk)

This makes sense.
Progressive utopias are invariably miserable shitholes. (The Atlantic)

Nothing new here except the source.
There is no HDMI 2.0, only HDMI 2.1. (WCCFTech)

They've done the same stupid thing as USB, where 3.0 got relabeled 3.1 Gen 1, then 3.2 Gen 1. USB4 at least mandates the USB-C connector and 20Gb data transfers; it's backwards compatible but all USB4 devices must support at least 20Gbps.

HDMI 2.1 supports variable refresh rates and HDMI 2.0 does not, but now that there is no HDMI 2.0 you have to stop and read the product manual - if you can even find one - to figure out if it's supported on any given display.

This is known as progress.
Attackers can get root access to Ubuntu desktop systems by crashing the login screen. (Bleeping Computer)

This is not good.

Do not - ever - install the Linux desktop on a public server.
Google has patched Chrome. (Bleeping Computer)

There's a thing. They're not saying anything about the thing so you can assume that it's very bad.

The update also patches 15 other things that have been discussed. And are also bad.
If your employer uses Kronos for payroll - and organisations including Tesla and and the San Francisco MTA do so - you might be in for a bad Christmas. (Bleeping Computer)

The servers at Kronos got breached and hit with ransomware. Kronos is advising customers to
evaluate and implement alternative business continuity protocols related to the affected UKG solutions.
Which is a rather sesquipedalian way of saying that you're basically rooted.
Speaking of rooted, Bluetooth. (Bleeping Computer)

Millions of devices have potentially insecure WiFi because the WiFi chip also implements Bluetooth.
Bleeping Computer has reached out to all vendors and asked for a comment on the above, and we will update this post as soon as we hear back.
In the meantime, and for as long as these hardware-related issues remain unpatched, users are advised to follow these simple protection measures:

1. Encase your digital devices in concrete, dump the concrete in the ocean, and consider moving to another planet entirely.
Evergreen advice.

Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day

That is extremely 1979.

Disclaimer: Go ahead with your own life, leave me alone.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:13 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 545 words, total size 6 kb.

Monday, December 13

Daily News Stuff 13 December 2021

On Beyond Quagga Edition

Top Story

Hmm. Remarkably little news today. Nothing new has exploded and ruined the lives of sysadmins around the globe. I think everyone is sleeping off the chaos of last week.

I wish I was.
Looks like that Log4j vulnerability first surfaced on December 1, a full week before anyone noticed. (ZDNet)

The idiot script kiddies using every server they can breach to mine crypto actually serve a useful purpose, in the same way that... 404 Analogy not found. In the same way that Billy the mailboy showing up to work with a thousand bucks worth of bling alerts you to audit your system before Svetlana disappears with a couple of mill.

Tech News

Little JNDI Tables.

A researcher hacked Apple - just a little bit - simply by changing the name of his iOS device. The logs show that Apple's servers dialed out to his research server when his connection was logged, which would have let him run arbitrary code within Apple's datacenter.

That's how bad this was. That's how easy it was to exploit. And it was everywhere.

It could be that Apple's logging servers are isolated and can't do anything, but they're not as isolated as Cloudflare's, which were configured so they couldn't dial out at all.
On the upside, there's this.

Someone exploited a bug in a logging library to make a Minecraft server run Doom.
New keyboard arrived. Accidental jellybeans too. Desktop shelving is now due next Monday rather than today, but whatever. The second Dell laptop is now stuck in between "shipped" and "on its way" - I think systems bound for Australia are assembled in Singapore, so there's a period where they go into stealth mode where they've been shipped from the factory but tracking just doesn't update.

Won't have time to do anything with it this week anyway.

Party Like It's 1979 Video of the Day

(Replaced the original music video with a later live performance because video not available in your location.)

Disclaimer: Not all that hot on Tuesdays either. Wednesdays I can deal with.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:01 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 354 words, total size 3 kb.

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Wednesday, December 22

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