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@KOOLER

The DDR5 standard is expected to be all done in 2018 providing a new memory standard that will double the bandwidth of our current DDR4 while improving power efficiency. It will, of course, take a year or two for that new technology to be available in the marketplace. Memory speed and efficiency are some of the biggest factors in computer performance and this will, of course, represent a sizable leap in processing potential.

https://www.servethehome.com/new-cavium-fastlinq-45000-25gbe-100gbe-adapters-rdma-dpdk-support/

New 25Gbe and 100Gbe NICs available with RDMA support. This is some screaming fast gear.

Dell is shipping new 15" and 17" super powerful Ubuntu-powered laptops. The laptops use the LTS release, rather than the faster "every six month" releases, probably for driver testing reasons. These laptops offer some impressive specs.

Looks like people are a bit unhappy at the push from Google to make Google Express (has anyone ever heard of this?) happen when no one is really interested in it.

The Register's Chris Mellor talks about @JeffReady and @scale this morning in a Scale Computing Profile...

Scale Computing CEO Jeff Ready reckons its hyperconverged HC3 software is better than anyone else's because it's integrated into the hypervisor's core and not just another VM.

Ready briefed El Reg at a March meeting in London.

Scale's HC3 product does not use VMware, being centred on KVM instead. Because storage access is integrated into the kernel, when an app in a VM makes an IO request it goes into the kernel, gets executed and control then goes back to the requesting app in its VM.

Ready contrasts this with a non-integrated hyperconverged system, in which a requesting app in a VM sends out an IO request. It's received by the kernel which sends it out to a storage controller in another VM. Once executed, control passes back to the kernel and then back to the requesting app, meaning two additional VM hops.......

Desperate to make their rulings make sense and not be clearly an affront to capitalize and a free market has stooped to redefined the word "choice" to make the claim that having a single provider constitutes "choice" in the US. Clearly hoping that no one remembers high school economics.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/one-broadband-choice-counts-as-competition-in-new-fcc-proposal/

Finally someone has built a full Macintosh emulator in JavaScript that can run inside of a web browser. Now you can run classic Mac productivity apps or play some classic games (Deja Vu anyone?) right in a web browser!

Taking a page from the Windows book, Ubuntu has decided to move away from its traditional dedicated partition for swap space and instead move to a swap file. There are actually some pretty solid reasons for the move.

Loads of new stuff in the latest Tumbleweed update, but some of the highlights include Samba, CEPH and BtrFS. openSuse is always heavily focused on storage and this update is certainly no exception.

No surprises, the NSA's leaked malware toolkits are now in the hands of script kiddies and being used to hack into Windows computers that have not been patched properly. I think this sums it up for the NSA:

2DayGeek has an article today on Managing Linux Servers with Cockpit. Cockpit is currently running by default in Fedora and is available natively in CentOS and expected to be found more and more in other distributions over time as it becomes more mature and capable.

Linux 4.11 has officially released today. The latest kernel update includes journaling capabilities for parity RAID (RAID 4, 5 and 6), improved hot swap drive support, new self encrypting drive support, general improvements, Shared Memory over RDMA (SMC-R) by IBM standard, audio improvements and more.

New telemetry data from Microsoft shows that Windows 10 is immune to the Petya worm (related to WannaCry) and that the majority of people infected by the worm were using Windows 7. In all the attack hit only about 20,000 machines, pretty much all of which fell into the "should have known better" category.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/microsoft-windows-10-immune-to-petya-most-victims-running-windows-7-516767.shtml

Edward Snowden talks with Network World and discusses why he loves the idea of open source and why proprietary (closed source) software is fundamentally untrustworthy. He also talks in the interview about valuing self hosting systems so that users have control over their data. A good read.

If you are not thrilled with the limitations of Bash on Linux, maybe you want to try out the much newer and more modern Fish Shell for Linux which is very powerful and more user friendly. If you spend a lot of time on the command line, it might be just what you need. Or if you spend very little but need to make it easier for when you do, check out Fish as an alternative to Bash, ZSH, ksh, csh or tcsh.

The EFF's report on companies that are looking out for you...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/07/comcast-att-whatsapp-all-score-low-on-new-who-has-your-back-list/

AMD has announced its amazing sixteen core, thirty two thread Ryzen Threadripper CPU with an MSRP of just $999. This is one amazing looking processor with a crazy number of cores plus hyperthreading. Raw clock speed of 3.4GHz with overclocking to 4Ghz.

This is some very big licensing and hosting news. Finally Microsoft has decided to end the strange ban on hosting Windows desktop OSes on shared use hardware which made Windows desktops insanely expensive on the cloud, for no known reason. Now cloud hosts are able to provide single cloud VMs without requiring customers to reserve an entire server for the task. This will significantly change cloud hosting offerings and we expect to see Windows 10 as an offering on places like Vultr, Amazon and Azure very, very soon.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/21/windows_10_daas_licence_changes/

Phoronix has done an interesting performance test using several Linux system and the Linux for Windows subsystem on Windows (Ubuntu with a Windows kernel) and has produced some really interesting performance statistics. This is one of the most important performance studies that you will find because it uses a relatively uniform application stack all the way up with only the kernel, rather than the OS, varying between tests.

The Windows kernel generally performed quite well, but only "in line" or below Linux kernels. Linux appears to almost always carry some performance advantage in the most apples to apples possible comparisons.