• Want to go faster than fast?  Gigabyte's Aorus Gen4 AIC SSD can hit 15GB per second.  (AnandTech)
  
  It comes with 4 2TB M.2 SSDs installed.  Price not specified.
  
  
• Want to go just normal fast?  AMD's Ryzen 5 3500 and 3500X are on their way unless they aren't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  6 cores and 6 threads, where the previous generation had 4 cores and 8 threads.  The only difference between X and non-X - according to the leaks - is the L3 cache.  X has 32MB where non-X has just 16MB.
  
  Prices are expected to be $149 for X and $129 for non-X.
  
  
• Apple's Safari browser is dead.  (GitHub)
  
  It hasn't stopped moving yet, but as of Safari 13 it will no longer support proper ad blockers.  This is in the name of security: Apple is making it impossible for browser extensions to collect data on web pages you view.  But in doing that, they make it impossible for ad blockers to work.
  
  You can of course still use something like Pi-hole to nuke the ads before they even reach your browser.
  
  
• A vapid virtue-signalling Ruby programmer working at Google broke a bunch of people's Chef installations by yanking his library from GitHub.  (ZDNet)
  
  He discovered that (a) ICE uses Chef and (b) ICE detains illegal immigrants.  So he took down his library.  Which didn't bother ICE in the least but did cause problems for a lot of other people.
  
  Bright lad you have there Google.
  
  
• YouTube has decided that you are no longer you.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  Their latest stupid trick is retroactively changing the verification requirements, so that even though your account has been verified for ten years, it isn't any more.  Ha ha, what a lark.
  
  
• Twitter is testing a change that lets you moderate replies to your posts.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  This is stupid.
  
  
  

• AMD has announced a 280W 64 core Epyc CPU for water-cooled  servers.  (AnandTech)
  
  Admittedly Intel's 56 core parts use 400W, but this is starting to get out of hand.  The 5nm node is only expected to reduce power consumption by 20%, so that's not going to solve things either.
  
  
• Oppo's Reno 10x Zoom has a 5x zoom.  (AnandTech)
  
  Apart from that it's all the usual - Snapdragon 855 with a 2340x1080 screen, 6 or 8GB RAM, 128 or 256GB flash, and no headphone jack.
  
  
• The graphics on Intel's 10th gen Irish Coffee Lake processors are much improved.  (PC Perspective)
  
  It actually beats the Ryzen 3700U in several tests, though it gets soundly beaten in others.  Lots of benchmarks at the link if you're looking to buy a laptop with an iGPU adequate for light gaming.
  
  
• Intel's 10 core 10900X high-end desktop CPU is slightly faster than a Ryzen 3800X.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel said earlier that their 10th gen HEDT parts would deliver far better price/performance than current models.  I said that would mean price cuts.  I was right.
  
  
• Intel's Core i9 9900KS will have a 127W TDP which means it will actually use 250W at full load.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel's standard desktop TDP numbers are measured at base clock, and the 9900KS features a 5.0GHz all core boost clock.  Great chip for getting through the winter if you live somewhere like Hokkaido.
  
  
• Comcast announces yet another streaming platform.  (TechDirt)
  
  Wealth isn't finite, true, but you guys are still idiots.
  
  
• Tumblr's new parent just raised $300 million in funding which ought to last them six months.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
• Fuck you cPanel.  Was wondering why I was suddenly leaking another hundred bucks a month.  Plesk it is then.
  
  
• How to programatically handle the incomprehensibly tortuous new European Union copyright laws.  (GitHub)
  
  
• Thirdripper is up to 70% faster.  (ZDNet)
  
  The current 2990WX is a niche product that performs very well in some cases, and quite poorly in others, due to high memory latency on two of the four CPU dies.  It would seem that this has been fixed.  It would seem that this has been very fixed.  And that's just the 32 core part - AMD can freely scale up from there as needed.
  
  
• Samsung announced its first PCIe 4.0 SSDs with transfer rates up to 8GB per second.  (ZDNet)
  
  These first models are for PCIe slots and U.2 2.5" drives, not M.2.  And while prices were not mentioned you can count on "not cheap".  They do have a form of internal RAID and will keep working even if an entire flash die fails, so that's good.
  
  
• Well, that's spectacular, even for YouTube.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  They suspended Laci Green for impersonating a well-known YouTuber, specifically, Laci Green.
  
  Laci Green appealed this, and YouTube promptly responded...  And confirmed the suspension.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 20 2019 12:46 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 20 2019 12:50 AM (Iwkd4)

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• HP's Elite Dragonfly delivers a 24.5 hour battery life with the optional extended battery which you have to choose when you order it because it has no upgrade or expansion options whatsoever, not even a microSD slot.  (AnandTech)
  
  Also missing are PgUp/PgDn/Home/End keys.
  
  
• You could have got an AMD AM4 CPU for $4.90 if you had clicked this link before I posted it.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Frys was clearing out old stock of A6-9500 chips for cheaper than a 6502.
  
  
• TSMC's pipeline is full.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Earlier this year with the slowdown of the mobile market TSMC was left with spare capacity, but apparently things have picked up.
  
  
• Don't call Nazis Nazis in Austria.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• Functor, applicative, and monad: How to make any programmer's eyes glaze over.  (GitLab)
  
  
• AMD's Epyc 7302P is quite good.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It demolishes Intel solutions that cost twice as much.  It's "only" 16 cores, but does have 128MB of L3 cache, which is a huge win for certain workloads.
  
  
• Australia's NBN has proposed new 250Mbps and 1Gbps speeds which no-one will be able to get.  (ZDNet)
  
  
• No.
  
  
  
  
  
  

Video of the Day

Posted by: Jay at Thursday, September 19 2019 04:08 AM (mrlXS)

Posted by: ahd at Thursday, September 19 2019 10:08 AM (p41ME)

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• WiFi 6 is here. (AnandTech)
  
  It's one better than WiFi 5.
  
  
• Cerebras, the company that built that enormous 400,000 core AI processor, has partnered with the Department of Energy to build supercomputers based on it. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Could be interesting. A rack full of these would draw about a megawatt.
  
  
• Intel's Tiger Lake will be a quad-core 3.4GHz part. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time.
  
  
• Building an active-backplane 32-bay 2.5" NAS system? Onda has the motherboard for you. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Looks like it has room for 15mm drive height too.
  
  
• The witch hunt came for Richard Stallman. (Hacker News)
  
  He's resigned from the FSF because who needs that kind of shit.
  
  Here's the typical garbage article written about the events, which manages to get every major fact wrong. (ZDNet)
  
  While I often link to ZDNet, that particular writer has never, to my knowledge, written anything that wasn't a complete mess.
  
  
• GitLab has received $268 million in Series E funding. (Tech Crunch)
  
  I use GitLab. It's good, and keeps getting better. It is pretty resource-intensive, though, and the hardware requirements keep increasing.
  
  
• Employees accuse companies of using IT to increase productivity and improve corporate profitability. (ZDNet)
  
  On second thought, let's not read that article. It is a silly piece.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, September 18 2019 06:43 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, September 18 2019 06:58 AM (Iwkd4)

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• 64-core Epyc can do 8K encoding in real time.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Better than real time - 79 frames per second.
  
  I don't think this is a major selling point for Epyc, but when Thirdripper lands you can bet AMD will be showing this off.
  
  
• SVG is Turing-complete because of course it is.  (GitHub)
  
  
• HP printers want to spy on you in order to sell you even more overpriced ink.
  
  
• The Instagram app, it turns out, is afraid of no ghosts.  (Medium)
  
  Interesting because it's a pretty minor problem but well-detailed.  I deal with this sort of thing in my day job all the time.
  
  
• Good news, everyone!
  
  

• The Ryzen 9 3950X lands in two weeks unless it doesn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  AMD haven't said anything more specific than September but there's only so much September to go around.
  
  
• Meanwhile the Ryzen 3900X has the third highest PassMark score.
  
  At 31,877 the $499 3900X is just behind the Intel's $3000 Xeon W-3175X at 33,358.
  
  The large L3 cache on Zen 2 seems to give a significant boost to AMD on this benchmark - the 3700X outperforms the Threadripper 2990WX.  So this may or may not apply to your particular workload.
  
  
• Z is a functional language that installs with NPM and compiles to JavaScript.
  
  Having just spent a couple of days working with TypeScript, I can confidently say that this entire concept needs to die in a fire.
  
  
• Build your own 6502 computer.  (Eater.net)
  
  All the nerdy kids are doing it.
  
  
  
  
• Unionise, get fired is the new get woke, go broke.  (BBC)
  
  I seem to recall hearing of these particular idiots before.  But it's possible I'm thinking of different idiots.
  
  
• Buried in this typically moronic article about France banning Facebook's Libra is an absolute gem.  (Vice)

  "The monetary sovereignty of countries is at stake [from] possible privatization of money by a sole actor with more than 2 billion users on the planet,” [said French finance minister Bruno Le Maire].

  The monetary sovereignty.  Of France.
  
  
• Discord's Nitro game store is dead, surprising absolutely no-one.  (Neowin)
  
  Except possibly Google, who are very easily surprised, being complete morons.
  
  
• Ash finally won a Pokemon tournament.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, September 16 2019 03:03 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, September 16 2019 12:23 PM (PiXy!)

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• TCL showed off Frank's 2000" TV.  (AnandTech)
  
  Well technically it's 132" but 132 is close to 2000, right?  Right.
  
  It used 24 million micro-LEDs rather than a conventional LCD or OLED panel.  I have no idea what that means in terms of cost, colour accuracy and so on, but does that really matter when it's 2000"?
  
  
• France and Germany just banned private blockchains and probably a million other things too.  (Reuters)
  
  Their target was Facebook, but they are idiots and took out everything within a fifty-mile radius.
  
  
• When a large company urges the government to regulate its industry it is invariably in order to kill off smaller competitors.  (NPR)
  
  
• It's time to break up everything.
  
  
• The emulator for the Commander X16 I posted about yesterday.  (GitHub)
  
  40K of shiny 8-bit goodness awaits!  Runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
  
  
• JPMorgan's Athena platform has 35 million lines of Python code.  (TechRepublic)
  
  Python 2.7, to be precise.  Which means that no matter what the Python Software Foundation decides, Python 2 will be alive and supported for a long time yet.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 15 2019 01:26 AM (Iwkd4)

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• Endless Space is free at Humble Bundle for the next 24 hours.
  
  You just need to sign up for their newsletter.  Your email address has probably been leaked a thousand times by now anyway.
  
  
• Xiaomi's Mi 9 has (reads specs) no headphone jack.  (AnandTech)
  
  Please stop doing that.
  
  
• Sega's Genesis Mini comes with 42 games for $80.  (Ars Technica)
  
  That price is a bit high for the hardware - it's just another emulator running on a cheap Arm microcontroller - but it includes two controllers and the bundled game lineup looks solid.  I never owned a Sega console but I recognise most of the game titles even so.
  
  
• AMD's twelve-core Threadripper 1920X was discounted to $199 at Amazon.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Two problems: First, it requires an expensive motherboard that looks likely to be obsoleterated very soon, and second, I say was.  It's already out of stock.
  
  
• Asus' dual screen Zenbook Pro gets a full review.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  No PgUp/PgDn/Home/End keys on this one.  They have an excuse - there's not much room because they had to move the trackpad to the right of the keyboard to squeeze in the second screen above. 
  
  I harp on this because my own fairly nice Dell laptop with its 4k screen doesn't have those keys either.  I used to have a keyboard and monitor in the office so the days I was working there I would plug those in and everything would be great.  But now we don't have a permanent office because most of the Sydney-based staff worked from home anyway, and it turns out that not having those keys drives me nuts when I'm trying to code.
  
  And my new HP laptops don't have those keys either.  Sigh.
  
  
• Early Pleistocene enamel proteome from Dmanisi resolves Stephanorhinus phylogeny.  (Nature)
  
  Well good, because that's been bugging me.
  
  
• ChocoPy is a subset of Python 3 designed for teaching compiler construction.
  
  Only problems are the compiler is written in Java and it compiles to Risc-V, which makes it basically useless.
  
  
• King Canute eat your heart out: France wants to block Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency at the border.  (ZDNet)
  

Posted by: Jay at Saturday, September 14 2019 01:20 PM (vuQH5)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 14 2019 01:25 PM (PiXy!)

3 That sounds like someone not familiar with college professors would say.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 15 2019 01:26 AM (Iwkd4)

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• Intel says no our Celeron and Pentium processors aren't disintegrating while you watch and there's nothing to worry about probably.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you have a Pentium N4200 or a Celeron J3355, J3455, or N3350 there is absolutely nothing to worry - wait, what does this notebook have? - nothing to worry about.
  
  
• How Apple went from being a purveyor of interesting but overpriced gadgets to a purveyor of boring but overpriced gadgets.  (ZDNet)
  
  
• IBM launched its new Z15 mainframe capable of running 2400000 Docker instances on a singe node.  (ZDNet)
  
  At 2400001 it collapses into a black hole of infinite suckage.
  
  
• The Ramans do everything in threes.  (CNET)
  
  Yep, it's another one, due for perihelion in December.
  
  
• The famous Libet experiment that demonstrated that your brain knew what you were going to do before you did might have been wrong.  (The Atlantic)
  
  Or at least, misinterpreted.  Certainly this article misinterprets it, but people who actually understood it - including Libet - may have misinterpreted the data.

• Apple announced the iPhone Okay We're Not Going To Use Roman Numerals Anymore, the iPhone Okay We're Not Going To Use Roman Numerals Anymore Pro, and the iPhone Okay We're Not Going To Use Roman Numerals Anymore Pro Max and no, it's not the iPhone ][ either.  (AnandTech)]
  
  Now with basically what you had last year only slightly more so.
  
  Apple boasts of having 6x faster matrix multiply in the AI processor, which is actually significant.  It means your phone can do more clever stuff without having to pass it off to the cloud to get immediately stolen.
• Apple also announced a new iPad bumping the screen size up to 10.2" and well that's basically it. (AnandTech)
  
  
• That screen-scraping decision was a ruling against a LinkedIn request for a preliminary injunction so the case is still ongoing.  (TechDirt)
  
  That makes more sense.  Saying that LinkedIn can't take measures to block web scraping while the case is under review is very different from saying they can't ever do so.
  
  Even more analysis.  (Volokh Conspiracy)
  
  
• Chrome 77 doesn't distinguish EV certificates.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  This has been coming for a while.  It used to show the verified company name in the URL bar; now it doesn't bother.
  
  Also fixed are 36 security vulnerabilities so if you wanted to keep the EV notifications, tough.
  
  
• Australia's government is looking to ban Twitter.  (ZDNet)
  
  That's not what they thought they were doing, it's just what they actually are doing.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 12 2019 12:09 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 12 2019 10:10 AM (PiXy!)

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