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Charter Communications has claimed to the Federal Communications Commission that broadband users enjoy having Internet plans with data caps, in a filing arguing that Charter should be allowed to impose caps on its Spectrum Internet service starting next year. Charter isn't currently allowed to impose data caps because of conditions the FCC placed on its 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable. The data-cap condition is scheduled to expire on May 18, 2023, but Charter in June petitioned the FCC to let the condition expire two years early, in May 2021. With consumer-advocacy groups and Internet users opposing the petition, Charter filed a response with the FCC last week, saying that plans with data caps are "popular." Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...ant-data-caps/

Even back between 2005 - 2010 when I worked in computer retail, Toshiba's were always in a weird spot where they were more expensive for the same specs, but they had far less returns/warranty and better software, but not enough to justify the extra cost. At that point people went with HP ProBooks instead with better warranty periods and enterprise features. Keep in mine that was in Canada, so not sure how pricing was elsewhere in the world.

In a sign of AMD's answer to Intel Hybrid tech being quite far away from implementation in a product, the company filed patents to a rival/similar technology only as recently as June 30, 2020, with the patent application being dug up by Underfox. The patent calls for a multi-core processor topology with two kinds of CPU cores - a "high-feature" core (big core), and a "low-feature" one (small core). Here's where AMD's design is different: it calls for closely integrated groups of the two kinds of cores (one big core, and one small core), called "Processor Clusters." The dedicated L1 caches of the big and small cores in each group shadow data, while an L2 cache is shared between the two cores. Several such big+small Processor Clusters sit across a die, sharing the chip's last-level cache (L3 cache). This is unlike Intel's Hybrid design, where the big and small cores are spread apart on the die, with little cache coherency (Lakefield die-shot by le Comptoir du Hardware below). The patent also details the workflow of how the processor reconciles the ISA differences between the two core types. Source: https://www.techpowerup.com/270811/a...essor-clusters

Toshiba, a Japanese technology company, has announced last week that is exiting the laptop business in full. In 2018, Toshiba has sold 80.1% of its shares in Dynabook Inc. to Sharp Corp., Japanese company as well, just focused on electronics manufacturing. In the press release issued on August 4th, last week, Toshiba has transferred the remaining 19.9% of shares in Dynabook to Sharp and thereby has officially left the laptop business. "As a result of this transfer, Dynabook has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sharp.", says the Toshiba press release. This is one end of an era, as Toshiba has been manufacturing laptops from 1985, until this day in a way. This is one last goodbye to Toshiba, your laptop legacy will be remembered. If you were/are an owner of a Toshiba laptop, tell us about your experiences in the comments down below. Source: https://www.techpowerup.com/270824/t...aptop-business

Vulnerabilities in Qualcomm's DSP (Digital Signal Processor) present in the company's Snapdragon SoCs may render more than a billion Android phones susceptible to hacking. According to research reported this week by security firm Check Point, they've found more than 400 vulnerabilities in Snapdragon's DSP, which may allow attackers to monitor locations, listen to nearby audio in real time, and exfiltrate locally-stored photos and videos - besides being able to render the phone completely unresponsive. The vulnerabilities (CVE-2020-11201, CVE-2020-11202, CVE-2020-11206, CVE-2020-11207, CVE-2020-11208 and CVE-2020-11209) can be exploited simply via a video download or any other content that's rendered by the chip that passes through its DSP. Targets can also be attacked by installing malicious apps that require no permissions at all. Qualcomm has already tackled the issue by stating they have worked to validate the issue, and have already issued mitigations to OEMs, which should be made available via software updates in the future. In the meantime, the company has said they have no evidence any of these flaws is being currently exploited, and advise all Snapdragon platform users to only install apps via trusted locations such as the Play Store. Source: https://www.techpowerup.com/270838/v...ble-to-hacking

Device IDs of Intel's upcoming line of standalone USB 4.0 host controllers leaked to the web, courtesy Hardware Leaks (@_rogame). The controller possibly comes in three variants, bearing device IDs 0x9A1B, 0x9A1D, and 0x9A13. The alleged Intel confidential document screengrab speaks of USB 4.0 and USB 3.2 support (no mention of USB 2.0/1.1), and USB Power Delivery 3.0. With USB 4.0, the USB-IF (USB Implementers Forum, or the special interest group behind USB), appears to want to standardize the USB type-C connector, eventually phasing out the type-A connector. To that effect, the document leaves out mention of USB 2.0/1.1 backwards compatibility. USB 4.0 debuts with an interface bandwidth of 40 Gbps, or 8 times that of USB 3.0, or over 80 times that of USB 2.0. Source: https://www.techpowerup.com/270853/d...ype-a-revealed

As we are getting close to the launch of RDNA 2 based GPUs, which are supposedly coming in September this year, the number of rumors is starting to increase. Today, a new rumor coming from the Chinese forum Chiphell is coming our way. A user called "wjm47196" known for providing rumors and all kinds of pieces of information has specified that AMD's RDNA 2 based "Big Navi" GPU will come in two configurations - 12 GB and 16 GB VRAM variants. Being that that is Navi 21 chip, which represents the top-end GPU, it is logical that AMD has put a higher amount of VRAM like 12 GB and 16 GB. It is possible that AMD could separate the two variants like NVIDIA done with GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and Titan RTX, so the 16 GB variant is a bit faster, possibly featuring a higher number of streaming processors. Source: https://www.techpowerup.com/270859/a...configurations

EA is preparing to launch its game subscription service EA Access on Steam. The EA Access service grants access to a library of over 70 EA games, this is the first time the program will be available outside of the company's Origin launcher. The game subscription service will cost 4.99 USD per month or 29.99 USD per year and includes major titles from the Battlefield, Need for Speed, Plants vs Zombies, and STAR WARS Battlefront series. Program members will also receive a 10% discount on all EA games & DLC along with a 10 hour early access period for certain new titles. This will be the fourth platform to receive the program after the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and the Origin client. Source: https://www.techpowerup.com/270860/e...-soon-to-steam

Alphacool today joins EKWB and XSPC (and Dazmode, before) in launching ultra thin sub-30 mm thick radiators for PC watercooling. Labeled the NexXxoS ST25, these are 25.5 mm thick and are the same radiators as those used in their Eisbaer LT CPU AIO coolers. These radiators are compatible with copper/brass/nickel loops, with copper fins and coolant channels, a steel housing, and brass threads on the two BSP G1/4" ports aboard the radiator. The core uses 15 FPI fins, which we speculate are the same fin geometry as with their other NexXxoS radiators with a louvered surface and ~25-30 µm in thickness. The NexXxoS ST25 is only available in 120 mm sizes for now, with prices ranging from 31.99€ for the ST25 120, to 39.47€ for the ST25 240, and 58.49€ for the ST25 360, with all prices inclusive of VAT. Source: https://www.techpowerup.com/270866/a...thin-radiators

An outbreak of Salmonella infections linked to tainted onions has mushroomed in North America. So far, the outbreak has sickened 879 people, hospitalizing 114 across 43 US states and seven Canadian provinces. The US Food and Drug Administration traced the outbreak back to red onions produced by Thomson International Inc. of Bakersfield, California. Thomson issued a recall of all of its onions August 1, covering red, yellow, white, and sweet bulbs that were shipped any time after May 1. But the outbreak numbers will likely continue to climb, given the potentially week-long period between eating a bad onion and developing symptoms, plus a typical two-to-four-week lag in case reporting. Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020...sickening-900/

Parallels Desktop 16 launched on the Mac today. It's the latest major release of the software used by developers and others to run Windows, Linux, and macOS applications and virtual machines under macOS. Its most notable offering is full support for macOS Big Sur. According to the Parallels representatives Ars spoke with, Big Sur support was no small task: Big Sur ended support for the third-party kernel extensions that Parallels built on. That meant an enormous amount of work was required to play nice with Big Sur—25 human-years of engineering work, they claimed. In addition to supporting Big Sur for both host machines and virtual machines, Parallels Desktop 16 has a slightly different look to fit the different appearance Apple has gone with in Big Sur. Source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020...port-and-more/

The major addition to this year's 6-Series Roku TVs is mini-LED backlighting, which TCL first introduced to mass-market TVs with its premium 8-Series sets last year. As the name suggests, mini-LEDs are essentially smaller variants of traditional LEDs—generally 0.2mm or less. Because mini-LEDs are so mini, TV manufacturers can include much more of them in their displays: there are more than 25,000 mini-LEDs across the back of the aforementioned 8-Series, and TCL says there are "thousands" on the 6-Series. Source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020...-start-at-650/

Back in 2016, Ars reported on an interesting use for the bundle of sensors we carry around every day in our smartphones—earthquake detection. The accelerometers in your phone make a passable-enough seismometer, and together with location data and enough users, you could detect earthquakes and warn users as the shocks roll across the landscape. The University of California-Berkeley, along with funding from the state of California, built an app called "MyShake" and a cheap, effective earthquake detection network was born, at least, it was born for people who installed the app. What if you didn't need to install the app? What if earthquake detection was just built in to the operating system? That's the question Google is going to answer, with today's announcement of the "Android Earthquake Alerts System." Google is going to build what it calls "the world’s largest earthquake detection network" by rolling earthquake detection out to nearly every Google Play Android phone. Source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020...ction-network/

Just under two months since Radeon Software for Linux 20.20 that is comprised of the AMDGPU-Open and AMDGPU-PRO driver components for these packaged drivers, Radeon Software for Linux 20.30 was quietly released at the end of last week. Radeon Software for Linux 20.30 provides the latest packaged Linux graphics drivers, primarily intended for enterprise Linux distributions like RHEL/CentOS, Ubuntu LTS, and SUSE Linux Enterprise. For most gamers running other distributions you are better off just using the latest Linux kernel and Mesa (and AMDVLK, if you want). Source: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...or-Linux-20.30 Might have to give this a boot up, but looking forward to his cross-driver comparison against Mesa 20.2.

The Supermicro SuperServer E302-9D / X11SDV-4C-TP8F-01 we are looking at in this review utilizes the Xeon D-2123IT with a 4C/8T configuration. It has the least TDP of all members in the D-2100 family, yet comes with support for up to four 10G ports. The 60W TDP of the SoC allows Supermicro to utilize it in a passively-cooled system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the only off-the-shelf x86 system that provides consumers with four 10G Ethernet ports in a fanless configuration. Source: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15906...nse-powerhouse

Right now it looks to just be Texas Instrument based LED driver chips which might be used in some computer peripherals and motherboards, but would be great for the DIY space in making your own controllers if there was a standard Linux Framework for it. Once a standard framework is established, I would imagine that many other programmers would come forward to add support for other LED driver chips.

Wasn't the FM socket updated since AM3 didn't support APU's and AMD needed to get a foot hold in that market?

Yeah, just not looking forward to migrating to a new Cache drive, I'm thinking a pair of the same SX8200 would be an okay Cache drive unless you can recommend something else. I think 512 GB might still be okay for now as I have a separate 1 TB 660p mounted to my Windows VM for game servers and the like.

Well I blew through my 512 GB 660p's rated 1 TBW Endurance in about a year on my Plex Server as the Cache drive: [TABLE] [TR] [TD]-[/TD] [TD]Critical warning[/TD] [TD=colspan: 8]0x00[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]-[/TD] [TD]Temperature[/TD] [TD=colspan: 8]39 Celsius[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]-[/TD] [TD]Available spare[/TD] [TD=colspan: 8]100%[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]-[/TD] [TD]Available spare threshold[/TD] [TD=colspan: 8]10%[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]-[/TD] [TD]Percentage used[/TD] [TD=colspan: 8]40%[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]-[/TD] [TD]Data units read[/TD] [TD=colspan: 8]18,890,734 [9.67 TB][/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]-[/TD] [TD]Data units written[/TD] [TD=colspan: 8]262,780,475 [134 TB][/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]-[/TD] [TD]Host read commands[/TD] [TD=colspan: 8]193,405,751[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]-[/TD] [TD]Host write commands[/TD] [TD=colspan: 8]2,680,048,673[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]-[/TD] [TD]Controller busy time[/TD] [TD=colspan: 8]18,679[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]-[/TD] [TD]Power cycles[/TD] [TD=colspan: 8]30[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]-[/TD] [TD]Power on hours[/TD] [TD=colspan: 8]11,446[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]-[/TD] [TD]Unsafe shutdowns[/TD] [TD=colspan: 8]6[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]-[/TD] [TD]Media and data integrity errors[/TD] [TD=colspan: 8]0[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]-[/TD] [TD]Error information log entries[/TD] [TD=colspan: 8]0[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]-[/TD] [TD]Warning comp. temperature time[/TD] [TD=colspan: 8]0[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]-[/TD] [TD]Critical comp. temperature time[/TD] [TD=colspan: 8]0[/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE] That Cache drive hosts: - Two VM boot drives - Plex Library files (not media) - Plex Temporary Transcode directory - Docker Image and Docker App Data (InlfuxDB, Tautalli, Unifi Controller, etc.) - Write Cache for network writes I should probably look at replacing those soon as Intel only rate them for 1 TBW or 5 years, no errors yet, but not super keen on risking things on my server...

I've been thinking of home surveillance options and would be interested if you went down this route in seeing what you do.

Longtime Linux kernel developer Pavel Machek has taken over as sole maintainer of the LED subsystem. For this first pull request going into Linux 5.9 is a big addition... The multi-color LED framework code has finally been merged. This multi-color framework for the Linux kernel has been in the works by Texas Instruments and is about exposing clusters of colored LEDs as an array to user-space that it can then adjust the brightness of said cluster using a single file write. This approach still allows controlling the intensity of individual LEDs as part of the array/cluster and the benefit of the framework is being able to do so in a single write. Source: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.9-Multi-Color-LEDs

Honestly haven't looked in to switches other than the Unifi ones I have that support it, but looking at the specs, that switch seems to check all the boxes you want. The dual SFP+ ports are nice for using fibre to get to other switches if you have long distance to get to.

Ah okay, so NAS 2 has two 10 Gigabit links both to your main network, one for network access, the other to NAS 1 replication? In that case, yeah, you would just need a switch in between the NAS's that supports link aggregation the same as the NAS 1, but since it would connect to your main network, can probably just do a single switch for the all 4 connections (2 from each NAS). Here is a decent /r/homelab Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/com...k_aggregation/ that has some options. I haven't looked in to that much, but from what I remember about my research in to aggregation on my UnRaid server was that having multiple 1 Gigabit links didn't increase throughput to a single client, only allow more connections at a time. So for NAS 2 to have increased throughput (over 1 Gigabit) to NAS 1, you would have to have to separate connections/transfers but even then they might still try to use the same link and only get 1 Gigabit speeds. Personally I just setup multiple NIC's with different Static IP's and kind of map different appliances to different IP's. For example, my secondary UnRaid box has a Quad Intel NIC in it: - Nic #1: Management/RDP/VNC - Nic #2: Connections from within VM's for file transfers/download - Nic #3: Plex and Web Services (external access) - Nic #4: Network wide file access

I've used ADATA drives before for friends and family builds and all the reviews have always been great. I probably wouldn't use an ADATA drive in my server environment without more long-term reliability data, but they have higher Endurance then Intel 660p's I'm currently using and still a 5-year warranty so either the products are actually great, or cheap enough that they can afford to have multiple warranty returns that they somehow keep quiet (I highly doubt that in today's age of loud internet negative reviews). Does anyone know of good stats similar to something like BackBlaze's Hard Drive reports? Does @ENTERPRISE want to fund a SSD reliability project

You would need a switch that supports it and also for the NAS itself to support it as well. Are you just looking to improve throughput during backups form one NAS to another? Is NAS1 or NAS2 the main one? I would personally prefer to have the two separate 1 Gb links, one for access to the NAS from computers, then the other direct to the backup NAS. So I would likely have a triangle arrangement where both NAS's have a line to your main switch/router for management access but NAS2 would be set up where you only have read-only access on that link, not sure what level of configuration you might have in that sense. Then on the direct link between the NAS's (static IP and gateway) the NAS1 would have Write/Read access to NAS2 to backup without affecting traffic to either NAS from the main network link.