Ambient Irony

Saturday, October 12

Daily News Stuff 11 October 2019

Here A Lake There A Lake Edition

Tech News

Yesterday it was Kaby Lake X, today it's Kaby Lake G getting knifed. (AnandTech)

This is the mobile processor with Vega graphics and HBM2 RAM. I don't think these ever sold terribly well because they used roughly the same power as a regular mobile CPU and low-end discrete graphics.

Desktop Kaby Lake has been shown the door too but there it's more a case of They're still making those?
Hide your NUC. (Tom's Hardware)

It has unspecified firmware vulnerabilities exposing you to unspecified risks. There is a specified update available.
How to run 600,000 concurrent websocket connections using AWS and Node.js.

Step one involves a grapefruit spoon.
A new superconducting material may hold the key to practical quantum computers. (Inverse)
Magnetic flux quantization is one of the defining properties of a superconductor. We report the observation of half-integer magnetic flux quantization in mesoscopic rings of superconducting b-Bi2Pd thin films. The half-quantum fluxoid manifests itself as a p phase shift in the quantum oscillation of the superconducting critical temperature. This result verifies unconventional superconductivity of b-Bi2Pd and is consistent with a spin-triplet pairing symmetry. Our findings may have implications for flux quantum bits in the context of quantum computing.
Got all that? Good.
The US Navy has filed a patent for a compact fusion reactor. (Popular Mechanics)

Cheap compact fusion is fifty years away.
When dragon drops end before they middle.

I like being a server-side programmer. Client-side is a howling wasteland with the occasional radioactive zombie.
Don't use Apple developer previews. Don't use their public betas. Don't use the .0 release. Don't use the .1 release.

Apple's cloud sync can replicate file corruption bugs from your beta test environment to your supposedly safe production system. (Tyler.io)

I've suspended OS updates on my iMac for a little while. Things aren't pretty.
Ken Thompson's Unix password was a chess move.

Even with modern GPU acceleration it took four days to crack, which shows that password choice still matters.

Guess the rule here is don't write such a successful piece of software that your hashed passwords get posted to a historical archive on GitHub decades later but that's kind of a mouthful.