Week 46 of 2019 summary

[cobito]

This week is a bit lighter than usual.

Beat It on the Flopplotron

A few days ago, a new interpretation of the song was released using floppy disk drives, scanners, and hard drives.

The history of DRAM inversion

Dynamic RAM has been with us for decades and will be for many more years. In this IBM blog post, they narrate the story of how Robert H. Dennard was able to store a bit in a single transistor.

The Linux Journal website disappears

The Linux-focused magazine ceased activity last summer. The website has continued to function until now as an archive of the magazine but it seems that has also come to an end. Linux Journal was in operation for 25 years, from 94 until this year. You can download all the magazines from this torrent of about 20Gb.

Firefox turns 15

Last Saturday, the browser that took over from Netscape turned 15. This article from FastCompany narrates the history of the program.

BackBlaze statistics

As every quarter, the cloud service provider publishes their statistics on hard drive failures. The brand with the highest failure rate is Seagate. The one with the fewest models prone to errors is HGST.

Intel does not fix security flaws

Whether it's because it's not possible, because the performance penalty makes it unfeasible, or simply because they don't want to dedicate resources to it, there are security flaws in Intel processors that have been public for a year and have not been fixed.

PeerTube 2.0 available

The decentralized alternative to Youtube has released a new version.

Intel is working to fix 77 security flaws

Or at least, that's what they say. In some cases, the solution involves disabling certain functionalities directly.

New security flaw in Intel processors

Although it may seem that the HardLimit front page has broken and keeps showing the same news over and over again, it's not the case. This flaw is on the scale of Meltdown and Spectre. In this case, it's about obtaining protected information using the CPU's internal buffers.

Game Ready Driver 441.20

The new version of the Nvidia driver comes with G-Sync support for new screens, CUDA 10.2, and even a bug fixed in Quake 3 Arena.

Crytek's Ray tracing benchmark

The game developer has published a benchmark compatible with all brands. It is planned to apply the lighting technique to their game engine next year.

The new features of DirectX 12

If you are deeply involved in the topic of game engines, this Microsoft post about what's coming in their API might interest you.

Intel starts disabling features

It has been seen in the changes to the Linux kernel. The deceased is something called Hardware Lock Elisium. It also gives the possibility to disable TSX. If anyone knows what these technologies consist of and their implications on performance, don't hesitate to comment because nothing has been found about it.

Performance penalties for Zombieload V2

The monotheme continues and as always, Larabel brings us a complete set of tests comparing performance with TSX enabled and disabled.

[kynes]

A somewhat catastrophic week for Intel. Well, not a week, but years.