• Well, maybe a little dead.
  
  
  
• Resolved a weird and long-standing performance issue with the system at work by turning off threads in the application server and using a full process for every worker.  Magic.
  
  
  
• The designated office area at New House can fit 12.2m of desk in an L shape - almost exactly 40 feet. 
  
  Do I need 40 feet of desk space? 
  No. 
  Am I gonna?
  Darn tootin'.
  
  
  
• Similarly, there's quite a wide U-shaped hallway that wraps around a core area (kitchen / bathroom) and leads to all the other rooms.  I can fit 16 bookcases along the blank sections of wall without putting anything in an actual room.
  
  
  
• In which bad things happen to bad people.  (Pluralistic)
  
  Ah, the schadenfreude is overpowering.
  
  
  

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, June 24 2022 11:23 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: David Eastman at Saturday, June 25 2022 02:08 AM (D6Mju)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, June 25 2022 07:32 AM (BMUHC)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Quick one today because usual reasons.
  
  
  
• The PNY XLR8 CS3140 is yet another boring SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Ho hum.  7.5GBps, 4TB capacity, 3PB write endurance.
  
  We live in an age of miracles and no-one is happy.
  
  
  
• QNAP again.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Seriously, they'd be safer if they simply caught fire.
  
  
  
• Motherboards for Intel's 13th generation CPUs will support DDR4 RAM.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Availability of DDR5 has improved but it's still a lot more expensive than DDR4, so this is something to consider if you're on a budget.
  
  
  
• Samsung has a new 200MP camera censor, 20% smaller than the previous model.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which isn't really an advantage in camera sensors - you want the biggest sensor you can fit.

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, June 23 2022 09:18 PM (rglbH)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, June 24 2022 01:04 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Friday, June 24 2022 10:10 AM (obo9H)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• So I ventured to vacuum New House, which is more than twice the size of Old House and carpeted throughout where Old House had hardwood floors in the living areas.
  
  Yeah, I'm going to get a Roomba or some suitable equivalent.  That's a lot of carpet.
  
  
  
• The FAA is ordering airlines to update faulty radar altimeters.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The argument has been going on for years, with cellular network operators swearing that their equipment couldn't affect aircraft instruments, and airlines swearing that it did.
  
  Turns out they're both right, because the instruments themselves are faulty.  The altimeters were designed decades ago when nothing else operated anywhere near that radio frequency, so the designers just didn't bother to filter out other signals.  And now that there are other signals, there are problems.
  
  The networks are happy with this decision.  The airlines not so much.

• The PCIe 7.0 spec is due out in 2025 - it will be twice as fast as PCIe 6.0, for an aggregate half a terabyte per second per slot.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A x1 PCIe 7.0 slot will be as fast as a full-size x16 PCIe 3.0 slot.
  
  It took seven years to progress from PCIe 3.0 to PCIe 4.0, and just eight to get from there to PCIe 7.0.
  
  I don't know if or when this will show up in consumer systems, but PCIe 5.0 was adopted very quickly.  By Intel.  Nobody else is shipping it just yet.
  
  
  

Eight Minutes of Dad Showing Up At the Worst Possible Time Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Thursday, June 23 2022 03:40 AM (LADmw)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Step One: Protect your critical web sites and services by putting them behind a globally distributed, highly redundant, fault tolerant content distribution network.
  
  Step Two: You'll still go down but now you have someone to blame.
  
  
  
  
  This outage took out the sites we run at work, the sites I use to do my work, and about a quarter of the news sites I visit to compile this daily post.
  
  I'm not sure just how widespread the effects were, because one of the things that went down was Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS service.  (The Verge)
  
  So anyone using that service - including automated monitoring services - would have seen the entire internet go dark.
  
  Downdetector shows Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Twitter all affected, despite at least three of those companies running their own content distribution networks.  But that might be in part because the monitoring systems went down.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Threadripper Pro 5000 chips are coming to retail.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Prices start at around $2500 - there are cheaper models for OEMs but they're not going to be available in the retail market - and it should show up just in time to be eclipsed by the new 4th generation Epyc server CPUs.
  
  But if you want a workstation for CPU-based tasks - video production, for example, or engineering - Threadripper is still the best thing out there.  Intel has some new high-end chips on the way but no launch dates or pricing as yet.
  
  
  
• Or you could just not use it: Disabling notifications on Nextdoor takes 130 separate clicks.  (Imgur)
  
  Not using it takes zero clicks.  It's like a smile only better.
  
  
  
• Those gluten-free donuts - these ones - are now available for online order; at first they were in-store only.  They're actually cheaper imported to Australia, on the freezer shelf, with sales tax added, than listed on that website.  Somehow.  Got more coming Thursday.
  
  I can only get the simple glazed donuts locally, but that's okay, they would be my first choice anyway,

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Wednesday, June 22 2022 01:54 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, June 22 2022 03:59 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, June 22 2022 06:09 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• We know that Intel's high-end 12th generation (and also 11th, 10th, and 9th generation) desktop parts are big expensive power-hungry monsters, but what about their low-end chips?  How does the $129 Core i3-12100 stack up?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Very nicely, as it turns out.  It's a 4-core / 8-thread CPU with none of the new Efficiency cores to complicate things, running at a maximum speed of 4.3GHz.  That's a lot slower than the 12900K at 5.2GHz, but it has a maximum power consumption of 89W vs. 241W on the 12900K.
  
  And while it's only a four-core chip, it's not slow.  It comes close to matching my old Ryzen 1700 desktop - an eight core system.  And easily beats the 11th-gen laptop I'm typing this on.
  
  If you want a desktop system that is cheap but fast enough to be practical, this - or the $199 six core i5-12400 if you need a little more oomph - is a good choice.

• Consciousness is computation.  (GitHub)
  
  Yes, I know that the headline of the article disagrees, but the article is retarded.
  
  The entire argument presented is that consciousness can't be computation because consciousness involves qualia, where qualia are defined as whatever is left over when you take away every part of consciousness that can be explained by computation.
  
  Which is a bit like defining art as what is left when you subtract the paint, the brushwork, the canvas, and the frame from a painting.  It sounds profound but doesn't actually mean anything.
  
  As Daniel Dennett noted many years ago, qualia don't exist.  Philosophers refuse to admit this because even burger-flipping requires real-world skills.
  
  
  
• So if computers can be conscious, is Google's LaMDA an example?  (ZDNet)
  
  Probably, but that doesn't mean a whole lot.  You can be conscious but still dumber and less useful than a toaster, as the White House Press Corps proves daily.
  
  It's not sentient, which is a somewhat higher bar, but then neither are many of the people on Twitter much of the time.  I don't know if it regresses into obviously sphexish behaviour, which is the definitive strike against claims of sentience, but then humans do that, and not just on Twitter either.
  
  
  
• Is the Samsung 980 Pro any good?  (Serve the Home)
  
  Yes.  It's not MLC (2-bit per cell) like previous pro models, but it is good.
  
  
  
• What's new in the Ada 2022 standard?  (AdaCore)
  
  Not that much by the look of things.  Ada is a very capable language already and doesn't need a whole lot of new stuff, so this is good.
  
  You can convince it, like JavaScript, that "5" + 3 = 53 but "5" - 3 = 2, but it induces enough pain along the way that you will hopefully reconsider.

Posted by: normal at Monday, June 20 2022 10:23 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, June 21 2022 01:28 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• My plane is late.  By over an hour.  For a flight that is just over an hour in the first place.  Well, means I have time to post.
  
  
  
• But a shortage of content.
  
  
  
• In the US, it's not the low-end cards selling below MSRP, but the high-end ones.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Admittedly those MSRPs are insane.
  
  
  
• Don't use Zstd compression on Arch Linux.  (Phoronix)
  
  It's normally a safe choice, but Arch uses a particular compiler flag by default that makes it 25x slower than Ubuntu for this specific case.

• The controls for the underfloor heating work.  That just leaves the oven, I think, as the only thing I haven't tested yet.  Oh, and the pump for the water tank.
  
  Temperatures hit zero this morning, but in C that's not all that cold.  Here inside I was snug and warm.
  
  
  
• There's a flaw with - not in, but with - browser extension wallets like Metamask that could let anyone with access to your computer steal everything.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  When you set up Metamask, it gives you a twelve word password recovery phrase.  You're supposed to keep that in a safe place, like, well, a safe.
  
  Your browser though sees it as form data that might be lost if you accidentally close the tab, so it writes it safely to disk.  Where anyone sharing your computer can find it.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Video card prices - at least here in Australia - seem to all be below MSRP.  Well, up to the RTX 3080 and RX 6800 anyway.  The 3090 Ti is still crazy expensive.
  
  The only reason not to buy one right now is new cards are on the way in the next few months.  Probably.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which: When AMD says something will ship "this Fall" they don't mean November 30.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The new Socket AM5 / Ryzen 7000 CPUs and motherboards are expected to be launched September 15.
  
  
  
• Everything you never wanted to know about USB-C but were forced to ask.  (Tech Powerup)
  
  USB-C is now used by USB 3.0, USB 4.0, Thunderbolt 3, and Thunderbolt 4.  Oh, and cheap USB-C charging cables (and some not-so-cheap ones) are often only USB 2.0.
  
  This article goes over all the features supported by USB-C generally and how to know which ones actually work with your devices.
  
  
  
• In this stunning exposé, BuzzFeed reveals that TikTok is owned by China.  (BuzzFeed)
  
  TikTok assured everyone that US user data could not be accessed by the Chinese staff.  They lied.
  
  
  
• Physicists have linked two time crystals into a single quantum system with two states.  (Live Science)
  
  The time crystals are formed by cooling helium-3 to within a gnat's whisker of absolute zero - which unlike 0C is in fact rather cold - and creating a standing magnetic wave, which because helium-3 at that temperature forms a Bose-Einstein condensate, a state of matter where the entire system shares a single quantum state - keeps going forever so long as you maintain the super-cooling.
  
  In this experiment they built two of those, and then brought them together so that the two magnetic fields interfered with each other.
  
  Time crystals generally are perpetual motion devices, just useless ones. They'll keep going forever, but you can only create them by pouring tons of energy into maintaining the specific conditions the require, and also if you look at them they immediately break.
  
  I mean, literally.  If you look at them they stop working.

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, June 19 2022 10:45 AM (MuaLM)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Redbean has reached 2.  (Justine.lol)
  
  Version 2.0 and also nearly 2MB.
  
  Readbean is a web server - that runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Free/Net/OpenBSD in a single binary - now with embedded Lua, SQLite, and Unix.

• Quick one because reasons.
  
  
  
• Rooftop solar can work - in Australia.  (New York Times)
  
  And in Arizona, and the Sahara Desert, yes.  Thanks.
  
  
  
• Europe's General Court squish a billion-dollar antitrust fine levied by the EU against Qualcomm.  (Reuters)
  
  Not a huge fan of Qualcomm, though hardware companies are much less annoying than software companies overall, but not a fan of the EU at all.  So, good.
  
  
  
• We put half a million files in one Git repository.  Here's what we learned.  (Canva Engineering)
  
  Don't do that.
  
  
  
• Benchmarks for a 4nm Zen 4 laptop chip appear to have leaked.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Ryzen 7000 for laptops isn't expected to arrive until next year; we've already had a Ryzen 6000 update this year, still on Zen 3 CPU cores but with dramatically better integrated graphics.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Thursday, June 16 2022 09:41 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, June 16 2022 09:48 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Grumpy and Recalcitrant at Thursday, June 16 2022 11:13 PM (nRMeC)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• A non-Apple hardware site reviews Apple's Mac Studio.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  They do like it, but if you go to page two you can see a PC configured at the same $2000 price point simply wipe the floor with the Mac.  Yes, the Mac Studio is small and elegant and quiet and sips power, but it's fast only in two specific cases: When compared with out-of-date Apple hardware, and when tested on Apple proprietary video codecs.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The World Health Organization plans to declare a global Gambian Pouch Rat Pox emergency.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The virus formerly known as monkeypox, but it's actually more common in rodents and the name has been deemed discrimatory.
  
  To monkeys.
  
  
  
• Chevy is auctioning off an NFT of a lime green Corvette.  (The Verge)
  
  The one small difference here is that you get the car.
  
  Yes, the actual vroom vroom physical car.
  
  This is slightly less stupid than normal.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, June 15 2022 09:46 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, June 15 2022 11:47 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: at Thursday, June 16 2022 01:12 AM (YBLgY)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, June 16 2022 09:40 PM (obo9H)

Hide Comments | Add Comment