Saturday, December 14

Geek

Daily News Stuff 13 December 2019

The Russians Pooped In The Hallway Edition

Tech News

  • Russian police raided the offices of Nginx, seized everything in sight, and detained employees for questioning.  (ZDNet)

    Supposedly over a copyright claim.  In reality, with Nginx serving close to 40% of all websites worldwide, this is either a money grab or a political power grab, and probably both.

    It's open-source and there's nothing Russia can do to stop anyone outside of Russia from continuing to use it, but this will mean no-one will trust any software from Russia going forwards.  So well done, guys.

  • Intel vs. AMD in the Microsoft Surface Laptop 3.  (AnandTech)

    Ice Lake is clearly faster on single-threaded tasks than the Zen+ based Picasso APU.  On multi-threaded tasks it's closer, except for some floating point workloads where Ice Lake simply runs away due to having double the AVX2 units.  Zen 2 also doubles the AVX2 units, so when the new APUs arrive that should close the gap.  But these laptops are shipping now and the Ryzen 4000 APUs are not.

    Gaming performance is mixed, with AMD still taking many wins despite the new Intel GPU architecture and much higher memory clock (3733 MHz on the Intel model vs 2400 MHz on the AMD).

    It will be interesting to see a new comparison once AMD gets Zen 2 APUs out the door.

  • Speaking of Zen 2 APUs Microsoft showed off the Xbox X.  (AnandTech)

    It's an almost featureless black box about 6" x 6" x 12".  No specs announced, just pictures.

  • Samsung has sold a million Galaxy Folds.  (AnandTech)

    For a $2000 device that disintegrated on initial launch, that is not bad at all.

  • Unless they didn't.  (WCCFTech)

    WCCFTech is posting a debunking of a story posted on other sites.  How the turns have tabled.

  • Navi Jr is here - the Radeon 5500 XT.  (PC Perspective)

    Performance is similar to the RX 470, 480, 570, 580, and 590 - which are all basically the same card anyway - but it draws 100W less power than the RX 590 to do it.  In fact it matches or beats Nvidia's recently released GTX 1650 Super in both performance and power consumption.

    Compared to the RX590 it is sometimes slightly slower on average FPS, but is more consistent, scoring higher in every case on the 99th percentile frame rate.

    There's also an RX 5500, but it's an OEM-only part with the exact same configuration but slightly lower boost clocks and a 20W lower TDP.  Expect it to show up in iMacs pretty quickly.

  • The ASRock TRX40 Creator was my pick as the best Thirdripper motherboard based on its specs.  Does it stand up under review?  (Tom's Hardware)

    Mostly, yes.  They don't recommend it if you plan to get a 3990X and overclock it, but it's feature-packed and robust for a relatively reasonable price.

  • If you have a Ring camera, probably easiest just to burn your house down right now.  (TechDirt)

    Blame raccoons.

  • Fuck.  (Plaid)

    It's hard to choose a money quote.  This is a nightmare.
    We were running 4,000 Node containers (or "workers") for our bank integration service.
    Holy shitbiscuits.
    The service was originally designed such that each worker would process only a single request at a time.
    You idiots.
    This design lessened the impact of integrations that accidentally blocked the event loop, and allowed us to ignore the variability in resource usage across different integrations.
    You complete and utter idiots.
    But since our total capacity was capped at 4,000 concurrent requests, the system did not gracefully scale.
    My God.
    Most requests were network-bound, so we could improve our capacity and costs if we could just figure out how to increase parallelism safely.
    I give up.  Just kill me.

  • VirtualBox 6.1 is here!  (VirtualBox)

    It adds support for importing and exporting Oracle Cloud servers.  I wonder why....  Oh.

  • A 24-port 10Gb Etherenet switch with two 40Gb ports for $475?  (Serve the Home)

    Catch is, of course, that it's SFP+ and you have to replace all your cables.

    They do offer a RJ45 to SFP+ adaptor - but at $65 a piece they'll soon cost more than the switch itself.

  • How has the performance of Firefox improved over the last two years?  (Phoronix)

    Spoiler: It hasn't.

  • On the positive side: If you want to create Firefox add-ons your developer account must be using two-factor authentication.  (ZDNet)

    Simple, obvious, and necessary.

  • Anyone want to take a bet on when scooter company Spin files for bankruptcy?  (SF Examiner)

    Their workers just joined the Teamsters Union.


Video of the Day


Kittens.


Disclaimer: KITTENS.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:55 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 753 words, total size 7 kb.

1 Plaid story:  is it just me or are they missing the entire point of Node?
This reminds me of a place I worked once where the original developer/architect "didn't trust" the database engine's transactions, so the entire application was structured in this idiotic way where whenever you needed to update the database you created a temporary table that shadowed a real one, filled it with the records you wanted, performed your modifications, and then when you were done, did something I can't remember that signaled a process that it should synchronize the database with the temp table.  Completely idiotic.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, December 14 2019 05:35 AM (Iwkd4)

2 I think the entire point of Node is as a horrible counter-example, but yeah, if it has any purpose at all it's as a lightweight async framework.  If you're not doing async I/O, there is absolutely no reason to use it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, December 15 2019 12:52 AM (PiXy!)

3 " I think the entire point of Node is as a horrible counter-example"
Well, remember what Ted Dziuba said:  "Node.js is cancer."

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, December 15 2019 05:02 AM (Iwkd4)

4 Here I was hoping the 4,000 Node worker story was a postmortem, or at the very least a solution article which ended with 'burn the whole thing down'.

Posted by: Jay at Monday, December 16 2019 05:00 AM (vuQH5)

5 Only correct ending for a Node.js story.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, December 16 2019 10:56 AM (PiXy!)

6 Something I missed initially about the 5500XT is that it's a PICe 4 card.  I just spot-checked a couple reviews and most of them don't mention it either--the only reason I noticed it is that Tech Jesus' review called it out (and then pointed out that it barely saturates a PCIe 3 link anyway.)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, December 17 2019 12:58 AM (Iwkd4)

7 It would probably be just fine on a PCIe 4.0 x4 link from the X570 chipset.  So you could run six of them at once.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, December 17 2019 09:32 AM (PiXy!)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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