November 25th, 2016 - The WAN Show Document

[LinusTech]

 

Rapid Fire

SpaceX News: Elon Musk Wins a $112-Million NASA Contract

Source 1: http://www.profitconfidential.com/stock/spacex-news-elon-musk-wins-112-million-n

Source 2: http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13730092/spacex-nasa-contract-surface-

• NASA decided to award SpaceX a $112-million contract

  • Will be for launching NASA’s “Surface Water and Ocean Topography vehicle”, or “SWOT”

  • Designed to scan the planet’s oceans and provide the “first-ever global survey of Earth’s surface water”

• The satellite will ride to space on one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets

• Launch date of April 2021 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, USA

• “We’re excited to carry this critical science payload into orbit for NASA, the nation, and the international community,” SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said in a statement

  • “We appreciate NASA’s partnership and confidence in SpaceX as a launch provider”

• Comes at a higher value than previous launch contracts NASA has awarded to SpaceX

  • Launching the Jason-3 satellite was valued at $82 million

    • They did this for ocean-monitoring back in January

  • SpaceX also supposed to launch NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS in January, 2017

  • Designed to look for small planets around bright stars outside our Solar System

Samsung Adding New Obtrusive Ads to your Old Smart TV

Source 1: http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/30/11814706/samsung-smart-televisions-ne

Source 2: http://www.wsj.com/articles/samsung-adds-more-ads-to-its-tvs-1464600977

• Wall Street Journal reports that Samsung is readying the European expansion of an initiative it started in the United States last June

  • Adding interactive advertisements to the menu bars of its high-end smart TVs

• Company reportedly plans to use software updates to retroactively bring the ads to older models that people already have in their homes

• According to the WSJ report, it’s part of a an orchestrated strategy on the part of Samsung

  • As they’ave found the television business to be less profitable since the original high-definition boom

• LG experimented with pop-up ads in 2013, and Panasonic has been using software updates to add startup banner ads for years

Report: Huawei Captures Most Profit Share for Android

Source 1: http://www.zdnet.com/article/huawei-becomes-most-profitable-android-brand-report/

Source 2: https://www.strategyanalytics.com/strategy-analytics/news/strategy-a

• According to research from Strategy Analytics, global smartphone profits reached $9 Billion in total during Q3, 2016

• Apple dominated and captured a record 91% share of all smartphone profits worldwide

• Huawei, Vivo, Oppo are the next three most profitable smartphone vendors

• Global Smartphone Operating Profit Share Chart

  • They are all way behind Apple in terms of Operating Profit share

Xbox One Streaming Comes to Oculus Rift on December 12

Source 1: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/11/xbox-one-streaming-oculus-rift-release-date/

• Nearly 18 months after the feature was announced, Rift owners will soon be able to stream Xbox One games to their VR headsets

  • Feature arrives as a free update to the Oculus Rift PC app on December 12

• Minimum network requirements aren’t stated, but it’s fair to say that the best experience will be over Ethernet, rather than Wi-Fi

Japan Plans 130-petaflops China-beating Number-crunching supercomputer

Source 1: http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/11/supercomputer-japan-130-petaflop-c

• Japan reportedly planning to build a 130-petaflops supercomputer costing $173 million that is due for completion next year

• Satoshi Sekiguchi, a director-general at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, told Reuters: “As far as we know, there is nothing out there that is as fast”

• According to the Top 500 site listing the world’s fastest computers, the current number-crunching champion is China’s 93-petaflops Sunway TaihuLight

  • Followed by its Tianhe-2, coming in at 34 petaflops

• Japan’s most powerful system at the moment is a 13.5 petaflop machine

  • Japan has the fourth-largest number of supercomputers in the Top 500 listing, after the US, China, and Germany

• Like 498 of the top 500 systems, Japan’s 27 supercomputers in the Top 500 list all run Linux

  • Likely that the new system will do so as well

• Machine will be used in the field of Artificial Intelligence

  • Name: AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure, or ABCI

• Plan is to allow Japan’s corporations to book time on the supercomputer for a fee, thus freeing them from the need to use the services of companies like Google and Microsoft

Google DeepMind Could Invent the Next Generation of AI by Playing Starcraft 2

Source 1: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/11/starcraft-2-google-deepmind-ai/

• Google’s AI Research team has teamed up with Blizzard to further develop deep learning AI

  • Announced at Blizzcon 2016

• Chris Sigaty, Starcraft 2’s executive producer points out that the AI DeepMind hopes to develop won’t be the first to play the game

  • They currently use a scripted AI

  • Designed by the developers, for the game, to work through a script and a list of conditions

• Orol Vinyals, one of the research scientists at DeepMind, says that Starcraft 2 may help AI research take a massive step forward

  • Because a game in which pieces aren’t static and movement isn’t turn-based helps create a better benchmark for AI development

  • “We feel that the complexity of Starcraft 2 enables us to now start testing algorithms that perhaps some years ago we were not ready to tackle,” Vinyals adds

• Video of the Starcraft 2 DeepMind feature layer API (0:24 Seconds Long)

• Sigaty says that the AI, if it reaches more sophisticated levels, could solve a few of the challenges Blizzard and its players face regionally

  • As e-sports observers and Starcraft 2 audiences know, South Korean players dominate all the tournaments and competitions they play in

    • Part of the reason is that their home environment allows them to compete with the best in the world

    • "If this is a success, those players won’t be limited by region to how much they can improve” Sigaty adds

Mars Lander Smashed into Ground at 540km/h After Misjudging its Altitude

Source 1: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/nov/24/mars-lander-sma

• Tiny lander (Schiaparelli) that crashed on Mars last month flew into the planet at 540km/h (335mph) instead of gliding to a stop

  • Happened on October 19, 2016

• Was on a test-run for a future rover meant to seek out evidence of life

• A computer that measured the rotation of the lander hit a maximum reading, knocking other calculations off track

  • This led to the navigation system to think the lander was much lower than it was, causing its parachute and braking thrusters to be deployed prematurely

• “The erroneous information generated an estimated altitude that was negative - that is, below ground level,” the ESA said in a statement

• Schiaparelli cost an estimated $251 million

Tesla Makes a Marketing Push in Hong Kong Ahead of Potential end of EV Incentives

Source 1: https://electrek.co/2016/11/24/tesla-hong-kong-marketing-push-ev-incentives/?

• Tesla President Jon McNeill traveled to Hong Kong to lead talks with local gov’t in order to extend the tax break for electric vehicles

  • Tax break allowed the city to become one of the world’s biggest per-capita market for electric cars

• The gov’t hasn’t yet agreed on an extension of tax breaks, Tesla launched a local marketing campaign to boost sales in the city before the end of the year

  • Included sending emails to local Tesla owners and fans in the area to announce new marketing events like ‘Tesla Night Drive’ to “test drive the Model S at night and to enjoy the after-dark Hong Kong scenery”, or “Tesla Cars and Coffee” event at local Tesla locations

• Company lists 6 different incentives to order your car in Hong Kong before the end of the year:

• Tesla is dominating Hong Kong’s electric vehicle market

  • As of July, Tesla has 80% market share of Hong Kong’s 5,800 EVs

Delete Yourself from the Internet by Pressing this Button

Source 1: http://thenextweb.com/apps/2016/11/24/delete-internet/

Source 2: http://deseat.me/

• Swedish developers Wille Dahlbo and Linus Unneback created Deseat.me

  • Offers a way to wipe your entire existence off the internet in a few clicks

• When logging into the website with a Google account, it scans for apps and services you’ve created an account for

• Every account it finds gets paired with an easy delete link pointing to the unsubscribe page for that service

  • Within a few clicks you can be freed from it

Valve Introduces “The Steam Awards”

Source 1: https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/695469-valv OP: Arcanekitten

Source 2: http://store.steampowered.com/SteamAwardNominations/

• Steam nominates games for 8 different categories

• Nominations run from Nov 23 - Nov 29

• Awards are to be held in December

• Here are the names for the awards:

 

The “Test of Time” Award

• This award is for the game that is just as good today as the day you first played it. Newer games may come out, but it doesn’t matter… you’ll always come back to play this one.

The “I'm Not Crying, There's Something In My Eye” Award

• Games are fun. But sometimes games become more than that, and touch you in a way you weren’t expecting. This award celebrates the game that blindsided you emotionally. You weren’t expecting to cry. It wasn’t in the plan. But it happened none the less.

The “Just 5 More Minutes” Award

• You have an early day tomorrow. You need to get some sleep, so you’re just going finish one more thing before you decide to tuck in for the night. Just one more. Wait, one more. What’s that you say? It’s 2:30 AM? This award is for the game that keeps you playing late.

The “Whoooaaaaaaa, dude!” Award

• Some games melt your face. Maybe it was a crazy plot twist. Maybe you just got your wisdom teeth removed. Either way, this game BLOWS YOUR MIND.

The “Villain Most In Need Of A Hug” Award

• Some people just need a hug.

The “Game Within A Game” Award

• Kinder Eggs. Peanut Butter Cups. Jelly Donuts. All great things stuffed with other great things. Like a mighty turducken, this award celebrates the best mini game hidden within another game.

The “I Thought This Game Was Cool Before It Won An Award” Award

• This title didn’t have a huge marketing machine behind it, but you found it and loved it. Then you told your friends about it. And they loved it. And now that little game that could is about to win an award… but always remember: you totally found it first.

The “Best Use Of A Farm Animal” Award

• Animals are rad and almost any game is better for including them. However this game used a farm animal in the best way possible.

The “We Didn’t Think Of Everything” Award

• (*name pending Selection Committee Decision) There are as many great ideas for awards as there are great games to play. And so we turn to the Steam Awards Selection Committee to come up with their own category and nominee. Senior members of the Selection Committee will review the write-in entries and create an entirely new category based on the feedback provided.

 

[PianoPlayer88Key]

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[Guest]

3 minutes ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

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Early squad

[PianoPlayer88Key]

Just now, deXxterlab97 said:

Early squad

haha

 

"Japan Plans 130-petaflops China-beating Number-crunching supercomputer"

 

Now how many fps would a gaming system with that much power get in the most demanding games, at 2x ultrawide 8640p, max settings?   (Although my imagination for "most demanding" may not exist yet - for example I'm imagining a game that would get 6-8 fps at 144p, lowest settings (similar quality to old webcams / cell phone video from ~1998-2002) looking at the skybox on two Titan X's, or the then-new equivalent if in the future.)

 

And being a wee bit more down to earth ... I'd like to see Linus build a gaming rig that has the same price to performance as a typical build with a 6600K and a 1060 6GB, but costs the same as the 7 gamers 1 PC or the 4-CPU Puget Systems build.   (So you'd get several hundred fps at hyper / max, 4320p or 8640p, multiple monitors, etc.)

 

[idmb]

By far my favourite part of this episode was hearing Linus talk about his house, makes me kind of wish you did a vloggy podcast too.   The ad-libbed stuff is much better than the "and the next thing on the agenda is...."   

 

And Luke, the instigator    

 

 

Obviously the solution is for Linus to buy his neighbour's house.    

 

 

[kcihtred2]

when twitch chat asks if you can sous vide a hot pocket...

 

http://skillet.lifehacker.com/will-it-sous-vide-you-picked-hot-pockets-1786400775

[hammerquill]

So, apropos of Windows updating without permission in the middle of the show... Luke - You've complained about Win10 a bunch, and in a previous video mentioned that you had had to kill a ton of extra processes and make a bunch of tweaks in the background to get something approaching a predictable platform for benchmarks. I, and I think a lot of us out here, would really love a video+text walk-through of what you did to make Win10 a better experience, even if you haven't figured out how to fix it all the way. I didn't see a "suggest a video topic" anywhere, except for TQ and for reviews, so I'm posting this here.

[Master Disaster]

@LinusTech

option + right click on finder icon > reload...

 

Also those of you who were in chat screaming about the AMD Zen SR CPUs and the AMD RX 490, Linus has said previously that if he doesn't cover something that he really should its probably because he knows about it officially but he is under NDA and can't comment on rumours for fear of breaking it.

 

Take his ignorance as a good thing, it at least confirms something regarding those items is coming.

[anotherriddle]

@LinusTech

Here is your space solution

regarding the best part of yesterdays WAN-Show

 

You have a garden right? Build a shed! A shed is the ultimate man cave. I am thinking of something like in the movie Mr. & Mrs. Smith (with a space under it)

 

or something like this:

but less crazy and with more computer stuff, VR and whatever else you want. (So, maybe more crazy )

You could make a forum thread to get suggestions. Or we could submit plans and you pick the best.

 

To be clear, I am completely selfish here. I want to see a video series building this (with less construction work and more networking and PC and stuff!)

 

[Tech_Dreamer]

this WAN show had a bit of huge elaborated sponsor spots & unnecessary jibber jabber

[Voigt]

Since I am European (and City with only 500k people) I have no idea how expensive really housing is in Vancouver.

 

So I just looked up, for a nice 100 m² (1100 ft²) building you would pay 4000$ rent. Yeah that is like 5 times of our normal rent.

[Sniperfox47]

@LinusTech

 

A note about the NVMe raid, if you're on a c600 chipset then you have Intel RSTe (the enterprise version of their Rapid Storage Technology RAID platform) which can hardware RAID a bunch of NVMe drives.

 

Support on Linux is a little spotty outside of enterprise distributions, but Windows Server 2016 supports it out of box and Windows Server 2012 supports it, but I think requires a driver install.

 

Additionally back in like February broadcom announced a bunch of NVMe RAID cards, but I didn't hear about them coming out. That may be worth looking into as well if RSTe isn't quite as robust what you need.

[fdwboy]

@LinusTech

StableBit's DrivePool is a great alternative to Storage Spaces, I use it on my home PC and work server. I tried using Storage Spaces on Windows 8 and was frustrated by the limitations with that version, especially with removing in-use drives and needing multiple independent pools for different duplication levels. DrivePool uses NTFS (ReFS support is in beta, and would eliminate the need for StableBit's Scanner) so any computer can read the data from a drive for easy recovery. It also allows for folder level duplication instead of having to setup a bunch of drive letters with different duplication levels. You can also designate drives as caches, I bought a couple 850 Evo 250GB drives for this purpose. AFAIK it should work fine with NVMe drives; Christopher (Drashna) on the StableBit/Covecube forums would be able to answer any questions you had

 

@Sniperfox47

Apparently no card has been released yet, as I'm not finding anything other than the press release. I thought there was a picture of the actual card around the time it was announced, but I'm not finding one now. You'd think they'd have released some form of this by now.

[Sniperfox47]

1 hour ago, fdwboy said:

@Sniperfox47

Apparently no card has been released yet, as I'm not finding anything other than the press release. I thought there was a picture of the actual card around the time it was announced, but I'm not finding one now. You'd think they'd have released some form of this by now.

Apparently it pays to do research before saying things from memory. I remembered wrong. The chipset they released wasn't released  alongside an AIC RAID Card that used it, it was released alongside and demoed on a ThunderX2 ARM server board that used it. Looks like it's mainly meant as a chipset for direct use on boards rather than as an add-in card, which I guess makes sense to keep performance from bottlenecking.

 

So looks like the options for hardware/firmware RAID on NVMe are:

1) On Intel c600: RSTe, which almost all of the NVMe array SuperMicro systems have support for, and in my experience works pretty good. 

2) On Intel z170/z270: RST, which isn't a great option but it works(ish) most of the time.

3) On ARM or anything else: Buy a storage-centric board with a RAID chipset built in.

[fdwboy]

@Sniperfox47

 

OK I was confused as well, I must have seen a picture of a different card that wasn't related to this product. Integrating it makes a lot more sense than a standalone card considering how much bandwidth would be required for 24 NVMe drives.

 

I should have figured that SuperMicro was using RST; PC Per put out a video where they raided three 950 Pros together and I remember Allyn saying that RST was the only way to raid NVMe drives, apparently that hasn't changed. Thanks for clearing that up!

[Sniperfox47]

5 hours ago, fdwboy said:

@Sniperfox47

[...]I should have figured that SuperMicro was using RST; PC Per put out a video where they raided three 950 Pros together and I remember Allyn saying that RST was the only way to raid NVMe drives, apparently that hasn't changed. Thanks for clearing that up!

Just want to clarify that their system was indeed using RST on a z170 board, but the RSTe found on c600 boards is a whole other beast.

 

Their end goal is similar but their performance, implementation, and abilities are quite different.

 

RST supports up to a maximum of 3 drives in various different configurations, such as a SSD acting as cache for a HDD, multiple SSDs in simple RAID config, and a couple other funky things.

 

RSTe has a *much* higher drive limit (I'm not sure what it actually is), does more of the word in hardware/firmware and allows for more complex RAID configs as well as having built in support for things like NVMeF (NVMe over Fabrics).

[Sniperfox47]

5 hours ago, fdwboy said:

@Sniperfox47

[...]I should have figured that SuperMicro was using RST; PC Per put out a video where they raided three 950 Pros together and I remember Allyn saying that RST was the only way to raid NVMe drives, apparently that hasn't changed. Thanks for clearing that up!

Just want to clarify that their system was indeed using RST on a z170 board, but the RSTe found on c600 boards is a whole other beast.

 

Their end goal is similar but their performance, implementation, and abilities are quite different.

 

RST supports up to a maximum of 3 drives in various different configurations, such as a SSD acting as cache for a HDD, multiple SSDs in simple RAID config, and a couple other funky things.

 

RSTe has a *much* higher drive limit (I'm not sure what it actually is), does more of the word in hardware/firmware and allows for more complex RAID configs as well as having built in support for things like NVMeF (NVMe over Fabrics).

 

P.S. @LinusTech if you really want to make a HOLY $H!T episode out of this you should definitely fiber link your workstations to this machine with rNICs and take advantage of the RAIDed drives over Fabrics. It would be glorious! Expensive..., but glorious!

[Gowthamgamer]

another nice video from you guys 

i hope you will be doing this in future

[shurik1]

Since I am on the market to find a good folder sync solution which exclude owncloud style solutions I am contemplating a range of options. That includes free stuff like Syncthings, cheap solutions like Bittorrent sync but I am finally leaning towards Microsoft DFSR. Now you mention $2K presumably Enterprise version of Peersync. What does it do compared to DFSR to justify the cost?

 

Also I do not understand the bad PR about RAID. It is not a replacement for backup but a still not too bad solution for hard rive failure. Anyone who owned Seagate 1TB or 1.5TB series would understand (never bought Seagate drives after that)

[msmafra]

"Right on time".

For Finder hold down Option and right click the infamous Finder icon on the dock.
Using pure macOS I think is not a good experience, installing some third party aids helps: iTerm, xtrafinder (does not work anymore (I guess), BetterSnapTool, Alfred (Amazing! even now with the improvements in Spotlight), Homebrew and some I can't remmenber right now ...