• SiFive announces the first OoO RISC-V core.  (AnandTech)
  
  The U84 core is a pretty straightforward 3-issue superscalar out-of-order architecture, but that's enough to make it four to five times faster than current RISC-V cores.  And a quad core complex with 2MB L2 cache measures just 2.63mm2.
  
  It will be followed next year by the U87, which will add vector processing.
  
  
• The Cray ClusterStore E1000 delivers up to 50 million IOPS per rack.  (AnandTech)
  
  The article says originally said 50,000 IOPS, but that's the level of a budget consumer SSD, which the Cray ClusterStor E1000 most definitely ain't.
  
  
• Beware of untitled geese.  (PC Perspective)
  
  Save files for Untitled Goose Game can execute arbitrary code.  This is considered harmful.  It's fairly specific since you need to load the save file into Untitled Goose Game for anything to happen, but still.
  
  
• Intel is preparing a 38 core server processor for 2020.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The numbers are weird because the cores are arranged in an MxN grid with two spaces in the grid reserved for I/O.  So the current 28 core processors are 5x6, and this will be 5x8.
  
  
• Running the world's largest social network is hard.  It's even harder if all your employees are morons.  (TechDirt)
  
  The Idaho health department placed a series of 14 ads promoting vaccinations; Facebook removed them all.
  
  A group chaired by Robert F Kennedy, Jr placed 10 ads promoting anti-vax conspiracy theories and they stayed up.
  
  
• Twitter has banned political ads which they define as advertising by anyone they don't like.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
• Why SaaSification is bad.  (ZeroTier)
  
  This is not a complaint about Software-as-a-Service in principle, but about companies like Amazon and Google taking a product - say, PostgreSQL - and offering it as a service without providing any benefits to the people who actually develop and support the code.
  
  This is an argument for viral licenses like GPL or AGPL in place of permissive licenses like MIT or Apache, at least if you have any aim to earn money from your work.
  
  This isn't great in principle, but it seems to be increasingly necessary in practice.
  
  
• If you're using ZFS with zlib it could be about to get a lot faster.  (Phoronix)
  
  This is due to an odd memory allocation decision dating back to Solaris.  I did some performance testing when I first started using ZFS and chose to go with lz4 over gzip because it was significantly faster.  This may be more due to the memory allocation than the differences in the algorithms.
  
  
• Chrome has removed Reopen Closed Tab from the tab menu because it is developed by savages.  (ZDNet)
  
  You can still find it if you carefully click in the 2.63mm2 of the title bar that is not taken up by tabs.
  
  
• The Samsung Galaxy Tab Active Pro is big, clunky, heavy, expensive, and has only middling specs. (ZDNet)
  
  
  On the other hand, it is waterproof, has a 15 hour battery life, and has a user-replaceable battery. And a headphone jack.
  
  
  For environments were an iPad Pro would get folded in half on the first day it looks like a good choice.
  
  
• Eat meat or keep breathing, the choice is yours.  (BBC)
  
  
• I am deleting the review.  Pray I don't delete it any further.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Apple accidentally deleted 20 million app ratings.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 01 2019 12:09 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Jay at Friday, November 01 2019 12:22 AM (mrlXS)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 01 2019 01:32 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 01 2019 01:33 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 01 2019 01:36 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, November 01 2019 04:23 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, November 01 2019 09:35 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, November 01 2019 01:44 PM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: hiab crane at Tuesday, February 21 2023 09:02 PM (eEEME)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Nvidia's GTX 1660 Super is out.  (AnandTech)
  
  Spoiler: It's a GTX 1660 with GDDR6 RAM.  That's it.  No other changes.
  
  But since it's only $10 more than the 1660, and the RAM speed is increased from 8GHz to 14GHz, it's quite a bargain.  It's nearly as fast as the 1660 Ti and $50 cheaper.
  
  But rather than replacing both the 1660 and 1660 Ti, Nvidia are choosing to squeeze the 1660 Super into the wafer-thin gap between them.  And the 1650 Super will launch in three weeks and add to the squeezeness.
  
  This has irked some reviewers.
  
  
  
  
• How Backblaze took 18 months to raise their price by $1.  (Backblaze)
  
  
• A Go programmer takes a look at Nim.  (Jungle Coder)
  
  Nim is to Python what Crystal is to Ruby.  I prefer Crystal because it compiles directly to executables using LLVM, where Nim produces C which then gets compiled, and my experience of that sort of thing - not Nim itself, but that process - has been blargh.  This article suggests that in this case it works pretty nicely.
  
  
• He'll save every one of us!  (Google Webmaster Central Blog)
  
  Browser makers are auditioning for the role of Ming the Merciless and killing off Flash.  And being arseholes about it.

  I still remember my son playing endless number of Flash games until my wife yelled at him. It's time to go to bed, son. Hey Flash, it's your turn to go to bed.

  In fairness, Adobe killed Flash slowly by embedding an infinite number of security problems.
  
  
• Google's Pixel 4 XL gets a bad review.  (ZDNet)
  
  In short, it's a great phone, if it's still 2017.
  
  
• Microsoft's Surface Laptop 3 gets a good review.  (ZDNet)
  
  In short, it doesn't fall over.
  
  That is, it's a modern lightweight laptop with a 3:2 screen ratio, so the center of gravity is much higher than a typical 16:9 model, and previous Surface Laptops (and other 3:2 devices) had a bad habit of tipping over if you took the name literally and put them in your lap. 
  
  My Spectre X2 is great, but you really, really need a desk or table or some flat surface if you want to use it.  Or it works fine as a tablet.
  
  
• Reports are circulating of new Android malware that can survive a factory reset.  (ZDNet)
  
  Exactly how it does that is unclear; it shouldn't be possible on an unrooted device.
  
  
• CS:GO keys are the new Bitcoin?  (ZDNet)
  
  Criminal groups were buying the keys in bulk and then selling them at a loss to launder cash.  Valve said oh no you don't and the price of keys instantly tripled.
  
  
• The MikroTik CRS312-4C+8XG-RM is a 12 port 10Gb Ethernet switch for $500.  (Amazon)
  
  It has 8 RJ-45 ports and four ports supporting either RJ-45 or SFP+.  
  
  (Thanks Rick C for the tip.)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, October 31 2019 01:17 AM (Iwkd4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Tech News

• Intel's Core i9-9990XE can hit 5.0GHz on all 14 cores.  (AnandTech)
  
  It runs at 255W and costs around $2000 if you're lucky enough to find one.  They're sold to partners only by special auction and in limited quantities.
  
  Or you could buy a 32 core Threadripper.
  
  
• Intel's Core i9-9900KS can hit 5.0GHz on all 8 cores.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It runs at 127W and costs $513, will be on sale for only two months, and carries a one-year warranty.
  
  Or you could buy a 12 core Ryzen.
  
  
• The US Senate has put a hold on a terrible horrible no good very bad House copyright act.  (TechDirt)
  
  The House bill legislated a streamlined copyright infringement process that could slap people with up to $30,000 in penalties without messy technicalities like due process.
  
  Ron Wyden and Rand Paul, thanks.
  
  
• Begun, the 10nm era has. (AnandTech)
  
  Only four years late.
  
  
• Ryzen 3000 had a bug in a specific random number function. AMD pushed out a BIOS patch. Motherboard manufactureres released updated BIOS files.  Only some of them forgot to actually apply the patch.  (Ars Technica)
  
  So even if you are completely up to date you might still have the bug.
  
  The bug can do nasty things to Linux security tools, which check that the random number they get from the CPU is sufficiently random, and keep asking for more random bits until they're satisfied.  If the bug is present and unpatched the number never gets random enough, so the system completely locks up.
  
  
• On the other hand, if you have the patch, the problem is solved.  That's a lot less true for Intel's speculative execution bugs.  (ZDNet)
  
  If you're running untrusted code on an Intel server (shared hosting, virtual servers) just disable hyperthreading already.  It's the interesection between speculative execution and hardware threading that produces most of the bugs, and you can't turn off speculative execution.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 30 2019 01:08 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 30 2019 01:11 AM (Iwkd4)

3 Nice to see a good explanation of the RDRAND bug.  I'd heard about it at launch but never what it was.  That's a pretty impressive one.  As always, there's a Relevant XKCD: (hopefully I'll get the BBCode right, it's copied from the help) 

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 30 2019 01:16 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, October 30 2019 08:55 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 30 2019 09:15 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 30 2019 09:20 AM (Iwkd4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Instagram has banned suicide.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  If you live-stream your death on Instagram, your post might be taken down and your account suspended without further notice.  So don't do that.
  
  
• Due to weather and California being a fading third-world shithole, oreilly.com is offline.  (oreilly.com)
  
  
• Delays in rolling out GMO "golden" rice has cost millions of lives.  (The Guardian)
  
  That said, it is The Guardian, so the story is probably wrong in at least three major ways.
  
  
• Surprisingly Turing complete.
  
  The list includes the usual suspects like CSS, SVG, OpenType, and printf, but also Pokemon Yellow and Super Mario World.  The former can be programmed to do anything at all by a combination of movements and item purchases, the latter by getting Yoshi to eat something he shouldn't.
  
  
• Sarah Lacy has sold Pando and quit journalism after suddenly realising (after covering it for 20 years) that Silicon Valley is a shithole.  (Pando)

Social Media News

• The Washington Post bememed itself over the weekend.  (archive.org)
  
  
  
  
  They did change the headline, but not the obituary itself, which is if anything even worse, and not before hundreds of people had taken screenshots.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, October 29 2019 08:29 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Intel plans to return to their former two year cadence where they release the same processor twice with different part numbers and then repeat that two years later.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In pursuit of this goal they have increased capital expenditure by 3%.
  
  Dream big, Intel.  Dream big.
  
  
• Intel's top-of-the-line 18 core Cascade Lake X HEDT CPU is 21% faster than AMD's 3900X mainstream 12 core part that costs half the price [checks Amazon] and is  actually available right now.  Unless it isn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  But it's 2.6% slower than the previous generation.
  
  
• Why Facebook news shouldn't be trusted.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  1. It's Facebook.
  2. It's news.
  
  I think that covers everything.
  
  
• A one page dungeon generator.
  
  
• A one page city generator.
  
  
• A one page tarot generator.
  
  
• Millions of people in California are about to lose power again because, unlike any other place in the world, they have weather.  (Mercury News)
  
  Yep, no weather anywhere else.
  
  
• How to make your Mac stop nagging you about Catalina.  (Robservatory)
  
  1. Install Windows.
  
  
• Adobe leaked details for 7.5 million customers.  (Comparitech)
  
  They've done that before, haven't they?
  
  Anyway, no payment details or passwords, so not a huge drama.
  
  

• A Windows PC that costs less than a Windows license unless it doesn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The specs are...  Meh.  It's an Atom CPU, and it's not one of the newer non-sucky Atoms.  But 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage are enough to actually do something useful, and more than enough to run Linux.
  
  
• Speaking of Linux, I set up one of those Binary Lane storage servers I mentioned, and I'm moving my offsite backups over to it right now.
  
  It uses disks and not SSDs, but that doesn't mean it's slow.
  
      # dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test2 bs=1000000 count=10000 10000000000

    bytes (10 GB, 9.3 GiB) copied, 5.70009 s, 1.8 GB/s
  
  I like Binary Lane a lot because they make it dead easy to install your own Linux ISO, so you can partition the storage and configure ZFS. On DigitalOcean you can't easily do that with the included storage, only for attached disks (which aren't particularly cheap).
  
  Ubuntu 20.04 may solve this.
  
  
• Raycraft: A comparison.  (AnandTech)
  
  Screenshots from the new Minecraft beta with Nvidia ray tracing enabled and disabled.  With those little before-and-after slidy things.
  
  It makes a huge difference to the atmosphere of many scenes...  But on the other hand, frequently makes it impossible to actually see anything.
  
  
• Okay, great, but why does it take 16 seconds to boot into BIOS anyway?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• Who do India think they are anyway, Europe?  (TechDirt)
  
  Courts just love to assert jurisdiction over the Universe and all the other places too.
  
  
• If it were more, it wouldn't be a Kindle.  (Six Colors)
  
  E-ink displays just haven't progressed to the point that anyone would want to run an app on them.  Until that changes, Kindles will remain kindles.
  
  
• The i3-9100F as a server CPU.  (Serve the Home)
  
  But, you say, that's a desktop CPU and doesn't support ECC.
  
  That would be true if Intel were at all consistent, but they're not.  Of all the 9th generation desktop CPUs, this one does in fact support ECC memory.
  
  And it's actually not bad.  It outperforms fairly capable low-end server chips from a couple of years ago, like the Xeon E3-1220 V6.
  
  
• Oh look another horrible PHP bug.  (ZDNet)
  
  Ugh.
  
  Only affects Nginx servers running PHP 7, and fortunately I'm not using that combination anywhere.
  
  Good that I know about it, though, because I'm doing a server overhaul at my day job right now, and we do run Nginx and PHP for some legacy apps.  Precisely because they're legacy we haven't upgraded to PHP 7.
  
  
• SMS roaming charges are for the birds.  (BBC)
  
  
• The videos are cool but atmospheric "gravity waves" are not gravity waves.  (CNN)
  
  Eddies in the space-time continuum.
  
  
• An ultra-short-throw projector gets put to the test.  (Ars Technica)
  
  This puppy can project an 80" 4K image given 3" of clearance.  That's kind of neat.  At $2700 it's not cheap - you can get a Sony 75" 4K smart TV for half that - and it's not great if the lights are on, but the flexibility is interesting in itself.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, October 27 2019 07:04 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, October 27 2019 12:31 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, October 27 2019 01:01 PM (Iwkd4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Intel has discovered a new atom.  (AnandTech)
  
  This is a new core design called Tremont, that follows on from Goldmont and Goldmont+.  Goldmont and Goldmont+ have been used in the Apollo Lake and Gemini Lake families respectively, which are the first Atoms to not suck.
  
  Tremont is supposed to increase IPC by 30% over Goldmont+, which should make for a quite competent low-end processor for home storage, network, and media devices.  If power consumption is kept down it could work well for tablets too.
  
  
• Realtek 2.5GbE cards are now available from...  The well-known global brand of Area Mr. Jack.  (AnandTech)
  
  Of course, there are exactly zero 2.5GbE switches available.
  
  GbE came out about 37 years ago.  Get your house in order, guys.
  
  
• The Outer Worlds is out.  (PC Perspective)
  
  You can get it from Crappy Communist Game Store for full price, or via the Microsoft Xbox Game Pass Thing for Windows for A$1 for the first month and A$5 per month thereafter.
  
  Steam is not an option, and CCGS is not an option as far as I'm concerned.  I tried waving my dollar at Microsoft earlier today but I couldn't get the confirmation email.  Not that I'll have time to play it for at least another week.
  
  
• Google's Pixelbook Go is kind of not terrible.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It did show an 11+ hour battery life in their tests, and even the 1080p screen is pretty good.  The high-end model is 4k, but 1080p on a 13" screen is by no means bad.  I have an older 13" 1080p laptop and the screen resolution was never really a problem, though I do love the 3000x2000 screen on my Spectre X2.
  
  
• SoftBank is not having a good week.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That said, conflating assets with revenue is fatuous nonsense propagated by the terminally innumerate.
  
  
• "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the TikTokMan.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Is everyone an idiot now or am I just unusually cranky today?
  
  
• Zen 3, 4, and 5 are on the way unless they aren't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Zen 3 has already been confirmed for next year, will be socket-compatible, and apparently is already sampling.  Zen 4 will follow "by 2022" and use a new socket - presumably for DDR5 support - and Zen 5 will come some unspecified time after that.
  
  
• The Darling River in Australia has run dry which has never happened before for at least a couple of years.  (Reuters)
  
  
• Why aren't people more upset about security bugs on flagship Android devices?  (ZDNet)
  
  The Galaxy S10 and Note 10 could be unlocked by anyone if you set up fingerprint recognition with a certain type of screen protector installed (because it uses a fancy new in-screen fingerprint sensor), and the Pixel 4's face unlock works even if you're dead.  Which...  I'm not sure how they found that out, and not sure I want to know how they found that out, but it wouldn't matter except that Google took the fingerprint sensor out of the Pixel 4 because they are idiots.
  
  
• Turtles all the way down.  (Motherboard)
  
  The Universe may be made of universes.
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, October 26 2019 02:25 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Kayle at Saturday, October 26 2019 03:35 AM (xGpde)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Rogue Trader is a Traveller-style tabletop RPG set in the Warhammer 40K universe.  Humble's latest bundle gives you the 400-page core rules, a 250-page campaign expansion, and two short introductory adventures for a dollar.  (Humble Bundle)
  
  They still, for the most part, don't bother to list page counts; I got those numbers by buying the bundle and downloading the PDFs.  I'll go nag them about that on Twitter.
  
  (In case you're interested, the five books at the $8 level are 75, 14, 146, 73, and 147 pages respectively.)
  
  
• I've mentioned before that Cloudflare is bad simply by nature of the way it concentrates the web through a narrow funnel.
  
  Turns out it's bad in a whole lot of other ways as well, several of them deeply stupid.  (Devever)
  
  I'm not convinced of the conspiracy theory floated at the end of the article, but only because the US government has not demonstrated that level of competence in the last, oh, 70 years.
  
  
• Microsoft made a big thing of servicability of their new Surface Laptop 3.  Is it really an improvement?
  
  iFixit rates it a literally middling 5 out of 10.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  But that needs to be put into perspective against the original Surface Laptop and the Surface Laptop 2, both of which scored zero.
  
  
  
  The battery is glued in and the RAM cannot be upgraded, and the EM shields are fiddly, but overall it's not terrible.
  
  
• Samsung is forging ahead with its custom-designed M-series Arm cores.  The Exynos 990 will feature dual M5 cores and dual A76 cores on a 7nm EUV process.  (AnandTech)
  
  Plus all the usual stuff like an interface for 100MP+ camera sensors, a 10 trillion operation per second neural network / DSP engine, 8K video encode, and DDR5 RAM support.
  
  
• TSMC says 5nm is on track for volume production in Q2 of 2020.  (AnandTech)
  
  There seem to be some supply constraints with current 7nm based on the availability of higher-end Ryzen parts, but there's no denying that 7nm is working well.
  
  
• Meanwhile, Intel is expected to start slashing prices on existing desktop chips.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Cascade Lake X is half the price of Skylake X, but Skylake X is still shipping.  Just not shipping to anyone who has the option of holding off on their purchase for a few weeks.
  
  
• Is legislation forcing open APIs on massive social networks a threat or a menace?  The answer lies in whether the bill has a cutesy backronym.  (TechDirt)
  
  "ACCESS", huh?  Kill it with fire.
  
  
• In other news Google's Stadia game streaming service is doomed.  (TechDirt)
  
  
  
  
• It's zombies vs. robots as the House of Representatives grills Mark Zuckerberg over Libra.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Libra as originally envisaged is probably, yeah, you guessed it.
  
  
  
  But I've always been more interested in it as an open source technology platform than a global payment-slash-surveillance-network.
  
  
• Tesla made a profit after a couple of quarters of losses due to stuff.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
• Twitter also made a profit, somehow.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Don't look at me, I didn't do it.

Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 25 2019 12:40 AM (Iwkd4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Google declares quantum supremacy.  (Google)
  
  
• IBM replies cougbullshitcough.  (Science)
  
  
• Everybody loves Apple's App Store!
  
  
• Storing 50 million events per second in Elasticsearch.
  
  Step 1: Store 200,000 documents per second on a 30-server cluster.
  Step 2: Write a blog post with a misleading title.

• Elassandra combines the $attribute1 of Cassandra with the $attribute2 of Elasticsearch.  (elassandra.io)
  
  Potentially a useful platform for data warehouse / analytics work.  I've used Cassandra (to store a ~1TB queryable ring buffer of a 10,000 message per second stream) and while it's a little fiddly it does deliver as promised.
  
  Update: Come to think of it (this project was a few years ago), the buffer was larger than that, and the key point was that it was stored on spinning disk.  This is easy stuff on modern SSDs where 100,000 IOPS is considered consumer-grade, but I didn't have that much SSD to spare at the time.
  
  
• 10 superpowers of HTML5.  (Medium)
  
  I spend so much time fussing with web apps these days that I forget how nice HTML5 is for web pages.
  
  
• A farewell to Google.  (ZDNet)
  
  Apple I could drop tomorrow - though I wouldn't throw out my iMac, it would work just fine running a different OS.  Facebook I visit on rare occasions.  Netflix I cancelled.  Twitter cancelled me.
  
  Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are trickier.  But I'll at least try switching back off Chrome.
  
  
• Stardock is aiming to do for Windows tablets what they did for Windows 8: Make them not suck.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  The new product is called TouchTasks and unless my licenses have expired I'll give it a try on my HP Spectre X2.
  
  
• Electronic Arts may be returning to Steam.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  I used to play The Sims and buy the new expansions as they came out.  I like the design tools, particularly now that you can create a variety of buildings and not just houses.
  
  Don't think I've touched it in three years.
  
  
• Blizzard is run by idiots.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  The occasional non-idiot just can't make any headway.
  
  
• The 2019 iPad is just fine.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It's 0.5" larger and has a slightly higher resolution screen, and comes with an extra 1GB of RAM (3 rather than 2) not that Apple specifies this anywhere.  Price and CPU performance remain the same.
  
  And it retains the headphone jack, so there's that.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, October 24 2019 12:14 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, October 24 2019 12:19 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, October 24 2019 03:14 AM (Iwkd4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Under the surface of Microsoft's new AMD-based laptop.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's not cheap, but...  No, that's about it.
  
  
• Precrime is not a thing.  (TechDirt)
  
  For now.
  
  
• SoftBank is taking over WeWork.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  No-one else wants it at this point.
  
  
• NordVPN gpt hacked.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Rather thoroughly.
  
  A year ago.
  
  And forgot to mention the fact to anyone.
  
  VPNs are useful for watching Crunchyroll when you're overseas on business and that's basically it.
  
  
• Even Wired is fed up with Andrew Yang. 

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 23 2019 12:30 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, October 23 2019 12:33 PM (Ix1l6)

Hide Comments | Add Comment