• Quick one because of a double helping of reasons today.
  
  
  
• Vodafone is planning to add carrier-level tracking to bust ad blockers.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This is designed to work around such problematic features as privacy controls and end-to-end encryption and hand power back to the advertisers, because fuck you that's why.
  
  Let's hope they get sued.
  
  
  
• Ryzen 7000 may clock as high as 5.85GHz.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Or it may not, but we have seen a live demo at 5.5GHz multi-core, so 5.85GHz single core is not out of the question.  But is fast.
  
  
  
• Thou shalt not speak English.  (The Guardian)
  
  The French are back at their favourite pastime, taking simple and widely-used English-language terms - "stream" - and replacing them with drivel - "joueur-animateur en direct".
  
  
  
• Blockchain: The amazing solution for almost nothing.  (The Correspondent)
  
  For the work I do, I need a cryptographically verifiable public ledger - and that's what the blockchain is.  I'm taking things that would usually just be a record in a corporate database and handing them over into the control of the customer. 
  
  It might not be much, but it's yours.  If the company cancels your account, it's still yours.  If the company goes out of business entirely, it's still yours.  So long as the blockchain itself stays up somewhere.
  
  But it would be much easier, much cheaper, much faster, much more reliable to just use a database.  Blockchains are like databases except they have a thousand-dollar-a-day cocaine habit and sometimes just don't show up on Monday morning.
  
  If your work doesn't actually need to be publicly verifiable and provably outside your control, don't use a blockchain.  Use a database.  Or clay tablets.
  
  

Posted by: David L Jessup at Wednesday, June 01 2022 12:05 AM (J4LmT)

Posted by: David Eastman at Wednesday, June 01 2022 02:30 AM (D6Mju)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, June 01 2022 12:51 PM (gVjvf)

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• The Ryzen 5800X3D is the fastest gaming CPU you can buy today.  (Tom's hardware)
  
  About 10% faster than Intel's 12900K, or 8% faster than the 12900KS with power unlocked, and about 15% faster than AMD's previous fastest gaming CPU, the 5900X.
  
  For productivity it's a different story - the 5900X has 12 cores rather than 8, and runs at a higher clock speed.  But effective zero games use more than 8 cores because that's what the latest consoles have.
  
  
  
• AMD's Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge is the fastest computer in the world.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Clocking in at 1.1 ExaFlops, it's almost enough to handle Microsoft Flight Simulator at 4K.

• More headlines from he 21st century: Robot orders increased 40% in the first quarter.  (Business Insider / MSN)
  
  Many entry level jobs are going to go extinct, which while inevitable, is not necessarily a trend we want to accelerate.  Change is a fine thing as long as it's not deliberately pushed faster than people can adapt.
  
  
  
• 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
  4. A robot may not be repaired by anyone other than the original manufacturer.
  
  Separate right-to-repair bills failed in North Carolina and California.
  
  You'll own nothing, and you'll repair nothing.  And you'll eat journalists, because bugs are too valuable.
  
  
  
• This year's iPhone will stick to TSMC's 5nm, and not jump to 4nm or 3nm.  (9to5Mac)
  
  4nm chips are in early production now, but apparently not in the volumes Apple requires.  3nm won't ship until late next year.  And 5nm is pretty damn good already.
  
  But this means the iPhone...  The 2022 iPhone probably won't be a significant advance over the 2021 model.
  
  
  
• Stuck some of my 8TB SMR drives in the Synology NASes so they're at least full of working drives.  Two mirrored in one unit, and one as a separate backup disk in another.
  
  So far they haven't done anything awful; as far as I know the serious problems only arise when rebuilding a RAID-5 or RAID-6 array, where they blow the time out from days to weeks.

Posted by: normal at Monday, May 30 2022 11:13 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Frank at Tuesday, May 31 2022 02:18 AM (rglbH)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, May 31 2022 02:11 PM (MuaLM)

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• If you thought NFTs were bad: This $70 water bottle has LED indicators, Bluetooth pairing, and an iOS app with microtransactions.  (9to5Mac)
  
  And it can't be used with hot liquids or submerged in water for washing.
  
  On the plus side, it doesn't need to be recharged all that often.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Have you tried turning your crabs off and on again?  (Northwestern Now)
  
  Speaking of headlines from the 21st century.
  
  
  
• 90% of remote learning apps used during school lockdowns - in the US and elsewhere - collected data on children and transferred it to ad companies.  (Washington Post / MSN)
  
  Almost 200 ad companies.
  
  
  
• Diesel prices are up sharply.  The way to solve the inflationary effects of this is clearly to spend untold trillions over an unknown period replacing all diesel fuel use with electricity.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Not just any electricity, but electricity from renewable sources.
  
  And presumably not nuclear either, but I can't confirm that because the rest of the article is behind a paywall and no way in hell am I contributing to the maintenance of their insanity.
  
  
  
• If your entire class is cheating on the exam don't use a public forum that the lecturer knows about.  (CrumpLab)

  I didn’t tell them I was in the chat. If you are a student reading this who happened to be on that chat, I was the account with the cactus emoji, named after our cat Detective Inspector Mr. Ernie Cactus Pants.

  And try to be a little bit subtle about it.  These college students cheat like third-graders.

  What did the student have to say? There were many full sentences and as I read them I got that feeling again. So, I copied and pasted some sentences into Google, and yup, the student was plagiarizing the academic integrity assignment. Whole swaths of text verbatim copied.

  The story does, eventually, have a happy ending.
  
  
  
• More notes about AMD's new Ryzen 7000 / Socket AM5 platform.  (Tech Powerup)
  
  Main point is that Ryzen 7000 has 28 PCIe 5 lanes from the CPU, compared to 24 PCIe 4 lanes on Ryzen 5000 - more than double the bandwidth.  That's nearly as much bandwidth as the early Epyc server CPUs, with their 128 lanes of PCIe 3.  These will make good desktop chips, but they'll also be great small server CPUs. 
  
  And not that small either - the current Ryzen 5950X is already faster than any first-generation Epyc server CPU.

Pikamee vs. GlaDOS Music Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, May 30 2022 01:18 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, May 30 2022 01:32 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, May 30 2022 01:46 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, May 30 2022 02:06 AM (r9O5h)

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• Headlines from the 21st century: Omnipotent BMCs from Quanta remain vulnerable to critical Pantsdown threat.  (Ars Technica)
  
  I'm trying to think what science fiction novel that reminds me of.  Heinlein had futuristic headlines in at least one novel, and I think the Illuminati Trilogy did too.
  
  Anyway, it's always a bad sign when your quantum BMCs drop their pants, so best to avoid that.

• Ryzen 7000 will be faster than Ryzen 5000.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The numbers are complicated.  AMD say the new chips will be at least 15% faster on single-threaded benchmarks than the Ryzen 5800X3D, a special variant with three times as much cache as the 5800X, but also that the high-end Ryzen 7000 parts will be at least 40% faster on multi-threaded tasks.  Multi-threaded scaling is normally less than single-threaded, because you have to get two things right - improve each thread, and make sure that lots of threads can run together without slowing each other down.
  
  The new chips will also support Intel's AVX512 instructions - performing 512 bits of calculations per cycle instead of the current 256.  AVX512 is notably power-hungry on Intel chips, and has been disabled on 12th generation consumer parts.  It's present in the hardware; it just doesn't work.
  
  40% better multi-threaded performance would put the 16-core 7950X at parity with Intel's $9000 40-core Xeon Platinum 8380.
  
  
  
• AMD also confirmed a Threadripper 7000 is on the way.  (WCCFTech)
  
  No details though, so we don't know when, or whether this is a 12-channel socket SP5 part or using the smaller 6-channel socket SP6.  Or both.
  
  They also said that Ryzen 7000 will max out at 16 cores at launch.  Not sure whether that's referring to Threadripper parts to come or higher core count Ryzen parts.
  
  
  
• Are we on the verge of an 8K gaming revolution?  (Ars Technica)
  
  <shake shake>
  
  Signs point to maybe.
  
  I considered getting a single large 8K TV instead of multiple 4K monitors, but it's not practical just yet.  Maybe once I've finished paying all the expenses for this move.  The loan itself works out to $5 less per week than I've been paying in rent, but there's a ton of other stuff to pay for.
  
  
  
• A top Federal Reserve official warned that the US could be falling behind in the race to set up digital currencies.  (Axios)

  We have the opportunity to wipe out trillions of dollars in savings in days rather than years.  We can't allow Europe and China to take the lead in this obviously self-destructive move.

  
  
  
• Why won't PC laptop makers let Apple's awful Touch Bar die?  (Macworld)
  
  There's more than one PC laptop maker, and each company makes more than one model of laptop.  If you don't want a touch bar, don't buy the touch bar model.  You still have literally hundreds of laptops to choose from.
  
  
  
• ChromeOS will now tell you when your USB-C cable doesn't do all the USB-C things and Apple should copy it.  (9to5Mac)
  
  They have a point.  USB-C is the one cable that does everything - up to 40Gbps data bidirectionally in a variety of different protocols - or double that in one direction for video, plus up to 240W of power in either direction.
  
  But not all USB-C cables are created equal.  In fact, most of them are less equal than others.  So having your operating system detect this and tell you, rather than leaving you wondering why you can't get a stable picture on your monitor, is such an obvious win that anyone who doesn't implement it should be strapped to the outside of the next Starship test launch.
  
  
  
• How to cancel your Amazon Prime membership.  (ZDNet)
  
  1. Log in.
  2. Click cancel.
  
  
  
• Three failed or failing drives on my (old, second-hand) Synology NAS cluster.  No two on the same device, and the last RAID rebuild is at 86% already and is on a RAID-6 volume.  For once I got to things before a disaster.
  
  Going to back up all my stuff onto them tomorrow, then put them in a box packed with pillows.
  
  
  

• Short one today because my hovercraft is full of boxes.
  
  Which all just fell over.  Yay.
  
  
  
• When even Vox thinks your project is a scam.  (Vox)
  
  Serial entrepreneurn't Adam Neumann, formerly of collapsed "tech" startup WeWork, is back with a new project to distribute carbon credits on the blockchain, as the - I swear I am not making this up- Goddess Nature Token.
  
  Vox - Vox - refers to this as "a scam within a scam".
  
  
  
• The high-end models of the upcoming Ryzen 7000 will indeed have a TDP of 170W.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There was some confusion over whether the number was constant power or peak power, and AMD has now clarified that it is indeed constant power, with a peak of 230W.
  
  This is actually good because the current 16 core parts are clearly constrained by something - either power or memory bandwidth - and the new parts will resolve both limits.
  
  
  
• Broadcom is buying VMware for $61 billion.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Previously EMC bought VMWare, and then Dell bought EMC, but more recently Dell spun VMWare off as a separate company.
  
  
  
• Doing some maintenance on my Synology boxes before the move.  Across four 8-bay devices I found one failing drive, one failed drive, and one drive so dead that the NAS can't even detect it as failed.
  
  I had two replacement drives that were almost the same model from an old PC (these are second-hand units from work, dating to 2013).  The third one I had to replace a 3TB drive with a 6TB model because I didn't have anything small enough.
  
  Looks like RAID will finish rebuilding this time tomorrow on all three.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Friday, May 27 2022 09:30 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Friday, May 27 2022 09:33 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, May 28 2022 09:39 AM (MuaLM)

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• Eastasia has always been at war with Elon Musk.  (The Register)
  
  China views Starlink as a threat, not just because it provides unfiltered internet access to anyone, anywhere in the world, but also because it already constitutes one third of all satellites in orbit, with that percentage growing fast.
  
  And maneuverable satellites are also anti-satellite weapons.  If it comes to a space war, orbital speeds are high enough that any collision is likely fatal, so the small size of the Starlink satellites in no way hampers their effectiveness.
  
  
  
• Also it seems Starlink is now generally available in the southern half of Australia, which includes both my current home and my new one.  Might take them up on that.
  
  
  

• The local people are living a safe, fulfilling, and happy life.  Or else.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The hacker, hacked: Documents and photos detailing the scale of China's concentration happy re-education fun-time holiday camps have been leaked onto the internet.
  
  
  
• And the 2FA you rode in on: Twitter has been fined $150 million by the FTC for being rampaging shitweasels.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down?
  
  Oh, right.  Specifically for their clever plan where there would lock your account for no reason, force you to use your mobile phone to receive an unlock code, and then use your mobile number to target you with advertising.
  
  
  

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, May 28 2022 02:49 PM (gVjvf)

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• Seth Green - Oz from Buffy and Dr Evil's son Scott from the Austin Powers movies - had plans for a TV series based on an NFT.
  
  
  
  
  Then it got stolen.
  
  
  
  
  Since he no longer owns the ugly monkey jpeg in question he also loses film rights and the project is toast.
  
  
  
  
  Sometimes things do work out for the best.

• Nvidia had it's own big Computex announcement the day after AMD.  If you want a server-only GPU that uses 600W and costs tens of thousands of dollars and can't actually output video, they're all over that.
  
  Not particularly interesting for you or me, but it does make them a lot of money.
  
  
  
• Asus announced a new 500Hz gaming monitor.  (AnandTech)
  
  Why?
  
  
  
• Asus also announced their high-end AM5 motherboard for the upcoming Ryzen 7000 series.  (AnandTech)
  
  The ROG Crosshair X670E supports two full-length PCIe 5.0 slots, plus a x4 slot running at a lower speed but I don't know what, and 5 M.2 slots two of which are also PCIe 5.  Plus USB 4.  Which when you add it all up requires more PCIe lanes than the CPU has available.  Not sure what they've done there.
  
  
  
• Spain is investing $13 billion to upgrade the country's semiconductor industry.  (AP News)
  
  I was looking around what countries had semiconductor factories and I believe Spain was on the list - they're not starting from zero.  And there are worse ways to spend $13 billion, as our governments prove to use every day.
  
  I do not expect much to come of this nonetheless.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, May 25 2022 09:00 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, May 25 2022 11:05 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, May 25 2022 11:34 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, May 27 2022 02:21 AM (PiXy!)

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• I pushed my house move back a week.  Just too many things to get done.  Which meant I needed to order more groceries at the old place - I'd planned to move this week and had already emptied the fridge.
  
  
  
• Florida's law curtailing social media's rampant viewpoint bias has - mostly - been ruled unconstitutional by a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit.  (ABC News)
  
  Everyone expected this; legislation directly preventing corporations from infringing users' broader freedom of speech violates the corporations' specific First Amendment protections.  It's a tricky needle to thread, and I'm not convinced this bill tried very hard.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Coinbase is testing an app for employees to rate each other during meetings.  (The Information)
  
  Are you people stupid?
  
  No, wait, the answer is clearly yes.
  
  The question then is...  No.  I don't care.  Just go away.
  
  
  
• GitLab 15.0 is out.  (GitLab)
  
  GitLab is increasingly a complete collaboration solution for development teams.  We use it at work.  It's great.
  
  It used to run happily in 1GB of RAM; these days I wouldn't try to run it in less than 8GB.  But if you are paying salaries for even a small number of programmers, a server with 8GB of RAM isn't even a blip.
  
  
  
• Why it's hard to sanction ransomware groups.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Because they're criminals.
  
  
  
• PCIe 5 consumer SSDs are expected later this year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  With transfer rates up to 13GB per second.  Which is a lot.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, May 25 2022 01:15 AM (LADmw)

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• Spun up a virtual server running Ubuntu 22.04 today. So far I have nothing to complain about.  Which is good, if dull.
  
  
  
• AMD officially announced Ryzen 7000, due "this fall".  (AnandTech)
  
  Most of the information we already had about it has been confirmed - though the 24 core model turns out to be wishful thinking at this point.
  
  The base model is 15% faster than the special edition Ryzen 5800X3D, which is good though not huge.  But it will go up to 16 cores where the X3D is limited to 8.
  
  Onboard RDNA2 graphics are confirmed for all Ryzen 7000 models, and clock speeds up to 5.5GHz.
  
  
  
• Also confirmed is that dual-chip chipset.  (Angstronomics)
  
  The chip is call Promontory 21 and is designed by Taiwanese company ASMedia - not a respin of the CPU's I/O chiplet.  It's not a high-end design, but you can simply run two of them to get more I/O.  They daisy-chain so you only get 4 downstream PCIe lanes from the first chipset, and 8 from the second.
  
  It's a 7W part so it won't need a chipset fan, which was a problem with the AMD's first X570 chips.

• AMD also announced their rumoured low-end laptop chip.  (AnandTech)
  
  Low-end now being four Zen 2 cores, LPDDR5 RAM, and RDNA2 graphics, manufactured at 6nm.
  
  
  
• What's in which version of Python.  (Ned Batchelder)
  
  Very helpful if you run PyPy, the Python compiler, which is usually a version or two behind the default CPython.  PyPy reached 3.9 about 4.5 months after CPython reached 3.10 - but it averages 4.5 times faster.
  
  
  
• Always look a gift horse in the mouth.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  If someone is offering you free crypto, they are trying to steal the crypto you already have.
  
  
  
• Hollywood Designer 6.0 is a fresh update to the 20 year old multimedia authoring system - for the Amiga.  (Amigans)
  
  Okay.
  
  Bonus feature: No crypto.
  
  
  
• Which watches can get Apple's new software update.  (9to5Mac)
  
  I should see if I can get my 30-year-old Seiko fixed.  Good watch.  Never once crashed on me, until it did.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has announce that Windows 11 "doesn't suck as much as it used to".  (The Register)
  
  Okay.
  
  
  
• Want to replace your iPhone battery yourself?  Don't have the necessary tools?  No problem!  Apple will gladly sell you the 79-pound toolkit for $1200.  (Liliputing)
  
  Actually you can get the toolkit free for a week, but why do they need to make it so hard in the first place?  On my Moto G4 you just popped the back off, unplugged the old battery, and plugged in the new one.  Tool-free and took maybe a minute.
  
  
  
• Cryptocurrency should die in a fire.  (Current Affairs)

  This is a virus. Its harms are substantial. It has enabled billion dollar criminal enterprises. It has enabled venture capitalists to do securities fraud as their business. It has sucked people in. So either avoid it or help me make it die in a fire.

  Well, as to that...

  Many that live deserve death in a fire. And some that die in a fire deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in a fire in judgement.

  Thanks Gandalf.
  
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, May 24 2022 02:38 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 24 2022 05:32 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 24 2022 05:35 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, May 24 2022 05:52 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, May 24 2022 05:55 AM (LADmw)

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