• Not even June and temperatures were already in the low single digits in Sydney overnight.  Brrr.
  
  
• Is Docker the new Hadoop?  (Smash Company)
  
  Well, eh.  You can get Docker up and running in five minutes on a $5 virtual server.  On the other hand, all the noise around Docker is created by the 0.01% of companies that need it at scale, just as with Hadoop.
  
  Docker does work out of the box as the world's least efficient package manager.
  
  
• On the third hand...  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Don't expose your Docker or LXD APIs to the public internet.  You idiot.
  
  
• RAM prices are going down, finally, and there's also little difference in pricing up to DDR4-3600.  (ExtremeTech)
  
  Time to finally upgrade Tohru and Rally.
  
  
• Flipboard got hacked.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The hack got encrypted passwords including some old ones hashed using SHA-1, and authentication tokens for Facebook, Google, and Samsung.  Best bet is to delete everything and never use the internet ever again.
  
  
• And that goes double for Wordpress.  (BleepingComputer)
  
  
• The launch video for Microsoft's new WSL terminal app got yanked from YouTube for copyright violation.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The claim relates to music used in the video that Microsoft already had a valid license to use.
  
  
• It's 2.3 billion AM.  Do you know where your files are?  (ZDNet)
  
  If you want to keep something forever, label it "porn" and put it in a public S3 bucket.

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, June 01 2019 04:23 AM (ZlYZd)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The PCIe 5.0 spec has been finalised.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's unlikely to actually reach the market before 2021 though.
  
  
• USB 20 is on its way.  (AnandTech)
  
  Also known (by idiots) as USB 3.2 2x2, parts will be shipping in August.
  
  This uses the same USB-C connectors and cables as USB 3.1, but has a smarter controller and uses both pairs of wires at the same time.  (With 3.1, the extra wires are only there so the cable still works if you plug it in upside down.)  So it is exactly twice as fast, and twice as expensive to implement.
  
  
• Toshiba announced their XG6-P SSD but it only does 3.2GB/s so who cares?  (AnandTech)
  
  (Toshiba SSDs are actually pretty good - Dell uses them in some of their systems.)
  
  
• Now the IEEE has banned Huawei.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Ouch.
  
  
• AM4 server motherboards!  Get yer AM4 server motherboards!  Lovely and fresh, right off the boat!  (Serve the Home)
  
  Since these are shipping right now, they are X470 and thus limited (at least for now) to PCIe 3.0.  But they specifically support Ryzen 3000, as well as ECC memory and 10Gb Ethernet.
  
  ASRock also showed off a Threadripper server motherboard, which is a bit of an odd duck but if you need the higher clock speeds vs. Epyc and can live with the lower memory bandwidth, could be very cost-effective.
  
  
• When a company makes "Don't be evil" its corporate motto, then changes it, you might start to wonder what they're up to.  (ZDNet)
  
  I hear that Firefox is nice this time of year.
  
  (This is another dick move by Google, brand new and separate from the three I listed yesterday.)
  
  
• How NOT to get a $30k bill from Firebase. (Medium)
  
  Don't fucking use Firebase?
  
  (Guess who owns Firebase?)
  
  
• Meanwhile the problem with Microsoft Edg [sic] has been fixed.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  It was a bu, says Googl.
  
  
• My new development server at Binary Lane is working.  I'm running Docker on LXC on ZFS on KVM on Ceph.  I think it's Ceph, anyway; it's definitely OpenStack because they provide API access.
  
  They also, unusually, support nested virtualisation, so I could run Docker on LXC on ZFS on KVM on ZFS on KVM on Ceph if I wanted to.
  
  I don't.
  
  
• Kara Swisher, censorship cheerleader.  (TechDirt)
  
  I sometimes wonder if there are two Mike Masnicks, the same way Glenn Greenwald has an evil twin from the goateeverse.
  

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 31 2019 01:28 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 31 2019 01:37 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 31 2019 01:43 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Kristophr at Friday, May 31 2019 10:06 AM (HkoJx)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Where is AMD's 16 core Ryzen oh there it is.
  
  Apparently a 16 core Ryzen engineering sample is at the show but not officially part of AMD's announcement.  So it already exists and will ship when the moment is right.
  
  
• Google: Incompetent or malicious or both?  (Thurrott.com)
  
  It's apparently too hard for Google to handle both Edge and Edg as user agents.  If only they had tens of thousands of software engineers...
  
  
• It's starting to look very much like the latter.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Sure, Chromium is open source, since it's based on KHTML.  But that doesn't mean Google won't find a way to screw you over.
  
  
• Even if you're not building your own browser and just want to create fast standards-compliant websites Google are right there with you, fucking everything up.  (Trib.tv)
  
  
• Meanwhile GNU Hyperbole is the single greatest work of art in the history of the Universe.  (Reddit)
  
  Either that, or it eats live babies.  One of those.
  
  
• Intel announced the Optane M15 with capacities up to 64GB.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Good job Intel.  Well done.  That's almost enough for Windows 10 if you don't plan to install any apps.
  
  
• TeamCity now integrates with GitLab.  (JetBrains)
  
  I use JetBrains IDEs all the time except that they don't support Crystal yet, but haven't looked at TeamCity, which their CI and issue tracking tool.  I'm not sure it does anything that GitLab doesn't already do for me.
  
  
• Fat chance, Huawei.  (ZDNet)
  
  
• Microsoft announced Modern OS and its plans to kill the project by the end of 2023 without ever releasing anything.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Okay, I might have read between the lines slightly there.
  
  
• Twitter banned journalist Nick Monroe for its usual standby reason of evading a previous ban.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  If they don't like you, they will ban you.  One way or another.
  
  
• Oh look Twitter banned someone who wasn't conservative.  (TechDirt)
  
  That proves everything is fine according to TechDirt.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, May 30 2019 12:05 AM (Iwkd4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Intel had their big Computex presentation and announced a slightly overclocked version of the 9900K, which we already knew about, and which should be available by Christmas.
  
  Which somehow took an hour and a half.  (AnandTech)
  
  
• Well, okay, the also launched the Xeon E-2200 range which are exactly the same chips as their current 9th-generation Core i5, i7, and i9 just with new labels.  (Serve the Home)
  
  
• And the long, long, long awaited 10nm Ice Lake parts with up to 4 cores at 4.1GHz.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Supposedly these have significantly better IPC than Skylake/Kaby Lake/Coffee Lake (which are all basically identical).  I'll wait for independent verification of that, because Intel have been over-promising and under-delivering since Ivy Bridge.  Because these are low-power parts with limited cores and clockspeeds they won't be winning benchmarks overall, but they will show what we can expect when Intel's next full generation finally lands.
  
  
• Dell has some retrofuturistic Alienware gaming laptops.  (AnandTech)
  
  They look nice, but they max out at 16GB of RAM, which my existing Dell laptop already has, and it's, what, three years old now?  More?  They support 4TB of SSD, but if I wanted to I could swap the 256GB SSD in my Dell for a 4TB drive.  They also support up to 8 core CPUs and an RTX 2080 Max-Q, which my laptop most definitely does not.
  
  
• Asus announced five new laptops - 14" and 15" Vivobooks and 13", 14" and 15" Zenbook models.  (PC Perspective)
  
  These all have a 5.5" touchscreen in place of the usual trackpad, which I think is a nice feature.
  
  
• They also announced the Zenbook Pro Duo, with a 15" 4K screen and a 14" 4K screen.
  
  No, not two different models.  One model, two screens - a full-size 3840x2160 OLED panel and a half-height 3840x1100 LCD touch screen above the keyboard.
  
  
• In theory the EU has net neutrality.  In practice, everyone ignores the rules and does whatever the hell they want.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• I can see your local web servers.
  
  Well in fact it can't, at least not at the moment, but it's a good reminder that web pages you load are free to try to poke around your LAN as well as making requests back out to the internet.  You have to secure everything.
  
  
• How to pair socks from a pile efficiently.  (Stack Overflow)
  
  Only buy one style of sock.
  
  
• How to seriously piss off Microsoft from the comfort of your own home.
  
  
• Add YouTube Gaming to the ever-growing Google Scrapheap.  (Thurott.com)
  

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 28 2019 11:57 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, May 29 2019 12:03 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, May 29 2019 03:53 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, May 29 2019 05:37 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, May 29 2019 11:49 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• AMD had their Computex keynote and as expected destroyed the entire deskop, workstation, and server CPU market.
  
  The only product officially launched (rather than just teased) was Ryzen 3000.  (AnandTech)
  
  Top of the line is the 3900X. 12 cores, 4.6GHz, 64MB cache, 105W, $499.  It easily outperforms not only Intel's 9900K (roughly the same price) but also their 9920X 12 core HEDT chip that sells for $1199.  (Or rather, sold for $1199, because if that price doesn't come down they're not going to be selling many more of them.)
  
  IPC is up by 15%, putting AMD definitively ahead of Intel on a clock-for-clock basis, which hasn't been the case since the Pentium 4 days.  Multi-threaded performance vs. 2017's 1800X is up 100% for the same price and an extra 10W of power.  50% from extra cores, 15% from IPC improvements, and 15% from clockspeed.  Multiply it out.  It works.
  
  Meanwhile the 3800X replaces the 2700X, and the 3700X replaces the 2700.  The 3800X is $399 (vs. $329 for the 2700X) and the 3700X at $329 is $30 more than the 2700.
  
  Rounding out the low end (six cores is now low end) are the $249 3600X and the $199 3600.
  
  All the 6 and 8 core parts have 32MB L3 cache, which is double the previous generation.  And that means that a fully-equipped Epyc 2 CPU will have 256MB of cache.  That's a lot.
  
  Ryzen 3000 will be available July 7.
  
  Notably absent is the 16 core model.  Clearly AMD are waiting for Intel's 10 core CPU to come out so they can nuke it on launch day with something that is both cheaper and 50% faster.
  
  Side note: AMD could clean up in the small server market with the 3900X - Intel only have 6 core parts out so far.  But only ASRock are making server boards for AM4, and without at least Supermicro on board nothing is going to happen.
  
  
• Navi also peeked out from behind the curtain.  (AnandTech)
  
  Also appearing in July, it delivers 25% better performance per clock and 50% better performance per watt than Vega.  And it supports PCIe 4.0.
  
  The Radeon 5700, the initial launch part, was shown beating an RTX 2070 by 10%, which is exactly what AMD needed to do.  Obviously they would have selected a benchmark that shows the card in its best light; on the other hand this is a new architecture and driver optimisations will improve performance over time.
  
  
• The X570 chipset also showed up briefly and appears to have been pared down slightly from 16 PCIe 4.0 lanes to 12.  (AnandTech)
  
  Board makers were not happy with its power consumption, which required active cooling, so AMD split it into consumer and pro parts; the latter will have the full 16 lanes available.
  
  
• Threadripper aten't dead.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Speculation has been swirling after Threadripper was found dead in a pool of its own blood at the bottom of a staircase in a burned-out hotel in a small town in Kamchatka missing from a roadmap slide.  Lisa Su put the speculation to rest:

  I don't think that we ever said Threadripper was not going to continue, it somehow took on a life of its own on the internet. You will see more Threadrippers from us. You will definitely see more Threadrippers from us.

  
  
  
• Arm has also been busy and announced the Cortex A77, codenamed Deimos.  (AnandTech)
  
  This is Arm's first step towards a super-wide design like Apple's self-designed CPUs, increasing the instruction dispatch from 4 instructions per cycle to 6.  It's expected to deliver 20% better IPC than A76, and open the door to further improvements next year.
  
  For comparison, AMD and Intel desktop and server CPUs only dispatch 4 instructions per cycle.
  
  Arm also announced the Mali G77 GPU as a companion to the A77.  (AnandTech)
  
  This offers 30% better performance and 30% better efficiency over last year, and 60% better performance in offloading AI tasks.
  
  
• Qualcomm is letting people actually run benchmarks on their 8cx Arm laptop chip.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It performs almost identically to an Intel i5, with much better battery life.
  
  If your software has been cross-compiled for Arm.  If not, you're toast.
  
  
• Intel announced the i9-9900KS.  (PC Perspective)
  
  A bit confusing, but it's a 9900K with 5GHz all-core boost.  So...  Overclocked.
  
  TDP not specified but probably fictional anyway.
  
  
• DigitalOcean don't have an Australian datacenter (though they are deploying Australian CDN nodes), and Vultr don't have attached storage in their Sydney datacenter so I can't do the ZFS trick.  But home-grown cloud provider Binary Lane (which I still think is a play on DigitalOcean via Neil Gaiman) have configurable storage sizes and let you install custom ISOs.
  
  And they start at A$4 per month which is just ridiculously cheap.  So I'm moving my dev/test servers from Vultr to Binary Lane and my production web servers from Hivelocity to DigitalOcean.
  
  My backup server will stay with Hivelocity because (a) it works and (b) I'm not likely to find a better deal on 48TB of storage any time soon.  (No, I don't use 48TB of storage.  I just happen to have 48TB of storage.)
  
  
• Razer announced the Blade Studio Edition which still lacks the PgUp/PgDn/Home/End keys.  (AnandTech)
  
  
• Acer announced the ConceptD (how the hell do you pronounce that?) 7 mobile workstation.  (AnandTech)
  
  Which is exactly the same laptop as its existing ConceptD 7 laptop except now the graphics card is called "Quadro".
  
  Also, while this one does have the PgUp/PgDn/Home/End keys, the unfortunate colour and industrial design choices make it look like a $199 Chromebook from Malaysia.
  
  
• Corsair announced their Force Series MP600 SSDs highlighting the chief weakness of PCIe 4.0 in that they require a whacking great heatsink.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Expected to ship at the same time as Ryzen 3000, 4.95GB/s read, 4.25GB/s write.

Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 28 2019 02:47 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 28 2019 02:59 AM (Iwkd4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• MSI is closing in on my ideal monitor with a 34" ultra-wide 5120x2160 display.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  What I really want is a 12800x2880 curved screen so I can have five 2560x2880 apps with one perfectly centered and two on either side.  Right now I'm, um, "making do" with three 27" monitors.
  
  
• A benchmark of what appears to be a 6-core Ryzen 3000 CPU has leaked out as these things inevitably do as launch day approaches.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Despite having "only" six cores and a slower clock speed, it outperformed the current top-of-the-line Ryzen 2700X on both single and multi-threaded tests in Geekbench 4.  Not by a lot, but 6 cores vs. 8 cores and it still won.
  
  
• I tried that thing where you mount your DigitalOcean object storage as a filesystem.  It doesn't quite not work, but I can't recommend it.
  
  
• Handling 5 million bids per second with a 2ms response time.
  
  To deliver web ads.  Maybe you're overthinking this, guys.
  
  
• Everything is quiet right now because Computex starts in two days.  Expect a lot more news once that kicks off.

Anime Opening of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, May 27 2019 01:17 AM (Iwkd4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

The Other Way Which I Haven't Actually Tried

• By a combination of ZFS compressed volumes and deleting a ton of old crap (expired sessions, duplicate entries, stuff like that) I squashed the mee.nu database down from 105GB to 22GB.
  
  That will help a lot as we move to DigitalOcean.  They charge for convenience, so I get less memory and disk space for the money (CPU potentially works out better).  Squishing the database that dramatically means we need that much less memory and disk space, so it's all good.
  
  
• Gigabyte is preparing a 5GB/s consumer SSD.  (AnandTech)
  
  PCIe 4.0 of course.
  
  
• Zombie Spectre meets the Disco Dingo.  (Phoronix)
  
  A technical analysis.
  
  ...
  
  Of the performance impact of CPU security flaw mitigation patches on Intel and AMD.
  
  
• Can we declare GDPR a total failure yet?  (TechDirt)
  
  I'm game if you're game.
  
  
• Blah blah everyone's private details leaked blah blah.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
• Did Apple's fourth attempt at the infamous "magic" keyboard succeed where previous attempts failed no of course it fucking didn't.  (iFixit)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, May 27 2019 04:39 PM (Ix1l6)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• QNAP has a USB 5Gb Ethernet adaptor.  (AnandTech)
  
  This works for all-in-ones and laptops and also - pure coincidence - for small NAS boxes that have USB 3.0 or later but only 1Gb Ethernet.
  
  The switch situation is still pretty dire though.
  
  
• Techdirt is suing ICE.  (TechDirt)
  
  For good cause.  ICE boasted of seizing a million websites over the past few years, often on very shaky grounds.  TechDirt filed a FOIA request for information about the million sites they publicly claimed to have seized.  ICE responded, "never heard of them".
  
  
• Chinese company clones a popular game.  Chinese company trademarks name of the game in China.  Chinese company then files a trademark complaint against the original game with the App Store.
  
  Apple removes the original game..  (Reddit)
  
  Don't be Apple.
  
  
• Crossfit has always been at war with Facebook.
  
  Crossfit is marginally less annoying.
  
  
• It's basically the Dread PirateBay Roberts.
  
  
• Google doesn't know what to do with Gophers anymore.
  
  Sad.
  
  
• The US Senate is coming for loot boxes.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Demarcation dispute, I take it.
  
  
• File it under "Sure, Jan": China isn't spying on Americans.  (ZDNet)
  
  
• One of the reasons I didn't go with DigitalOcean before and ended up paying a heap of money for a server I never really managed to use was because all the cloud providers lock you into their infrastructure.
  
  Here's how to migrate your VPS between DigitalOcean, Vultr, and LunaNode.  It's harder than it needs to be, but it works.
  
  I have DigitalOcean and Vultr accounts.  DO has a better range of services; Vultr has broader distribution, including, importantly, Sydney.  (DO says "use Singapore".  Ping times from Sydney to Singapore are often worse than San Francisco, rendering it worse than useless.)
  
  
• You can use DigitalOcean's Spaces (object storage) as a filesystem.
  
  Sort of.  Reading mostly works fine.  Creating, deleting, and replacing files is fine.  Updating files is a train wreck.  Not surprising that it has a problem; it's doing well to work at all.
  
  It's a fifth the price of block storage and can be shared across multiple servers.  If you're publicly service files out of your Space storage they also offer a free global CDN.  Australian CDN nodes are in beta, but I'll see if it's at least a public beta.
  
  
  

Anime Opening of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, May 25 2019 01:26 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Tuesday, June 04 2019 02:18 PM (LZ7Bg)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, June 04 2019 06:05 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment