MojoKid writes: Yesterday, AMD launched its new Ryzen 4000 Series mobile processors for laptops at CES 2020, along with a monstrous 64-core/128-thread third-generation Ryzen Threadripper workstation desktop CPU. In addition to the new processors, on the graphics front the oft-leaked Radeon RX 5600 XT that target's 1080p gamers in the sweet spot of the GPU market was also made official. In CPU news, AMD claims Ryzen 4000 series mobile processors offer 20% lower SOC power, 2X perf-per-watt, 5X faster power state switching, and significantly improved iGPU performance versus its previous-gen mobile Ryzen 3000 products. AMD's U-Series flagship, the Ryzen 7 4800U, is an 8-core/16-thread processor with a max turbo frequency of 4.2GHz and integrated Vega-derived 8-core GPU. Along with architectural enhancements and the frequency benefits of producing the chips at 7nm, AMD is underscoring up to 59% improved performance per graphics core as well. AMD is also claiming superior single-thread CPU performance versus current Intel-processors and significantly better multi-threaded performance. The initial Ryzen 4000 U-Series line-up consists of five processors, starting with the 4-core/4-thread Ryzen 5 4300U, and topping off with the aforementioned Ryzen 7 4800U. On the other end of the spectrum, AMD revealed some new information regarding its 64-core/128-thread Ryzen Threadripper 3990X processor. The beast chip will have a base clock of 2.9GHz and a boost clock of 4.3GHz with a whopping 288MB of cache. The chip will drop into existing TRX40 motherboards and be available on February 7th for $3990. AMD showcased the chip versus a dual socket Intel Xeon Platinum in the VRAY 3D rendering benchmark beating the Xeon system by almost 30 minutes in a 90-minute workload, though the Intel system retails for around $20K.

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Kyrie Irving says he may need shoulder surgery. As you may know I am not a huge fan of his. NY didn't need him. And it's obvious he didn't really want to play for the Nets or in NY, he wanted to play with KD. And until KD his healed, Kyrie would prefer to sit on the sideline.

Reminds me that the other day I saw a comment about Pete Rose and how he belongs in the Hall of Fame, and I couldn't agree more. For so many reasons.

Statistically it's a no-brainer. He has more hits, more singles, more at-bats, more games played, more outs than any other player in MLB history. He was Moneyball before there was Moneyball.

And then there's Charlie Hustle. Who else would dive head-first into second with no helmet? Is he even wearing gloves? Hard to tell. He should be in the Hall of Fame for this alone.

Charley Hustle.

So I said all that. And Alan Cooper who I know to otherwise be a reasonable person, asked if I would pardon Jeffrey Epstein (enslaver and sexual violator of children) or Nixon (defiler of the Constitution) because I would forgive Pete Rose for betting on his own team. I responded to Cooper that there is an obvious difference between Pete Rose and the others, sports. In sports we get to be judgmental assholes. You may hate Pete Rose, I love him. I loved him as a kid, because he taught me what passion was. It makes total sense to me that a man like that, too old to play the game himself, would indulge in gambling on the game, even when it was against the rules.

We are too intolerant of different points of view on social networks. But I refuse to give up the last bastion of intolerant assholery and political incorrectness -- sports. So I'll keep on loving Pete Rose and you can keep hating him, and life goes on. No one is the worse for it.

BTW -- in tech, where both Alan and I come from, we bet on our own teams all the time. It's the norm. We give people the means to bet themselves, hoping it'll motivate them. Even in sports there are performance incentives. Players are given bonuses if they achieve a specific stat, or their team makes the playoffs. I could see being pissed if a manager bet against their team, but betting in favor the team? I don't know, but I just don't see the problem. In any case, he's going to be in the HoF when he's dead. Let him enjoy the acceptance and love now. Inside that old body is Charlie Hustle, let him in, if not for him, for the kids he inspired.

REPORTER: What was the name of the contractor who was killed?

POMPEO: Schumann. I believe his friends called him Old Shoe.

Journalism knows three stories:

1. Both sides do it.
2. It's a horse race.
3. Watergate 2.0.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: New York City unveiled an ambitious plan Tuesday to bring universal internet access to its 8.5 million residents by partnering with private internet service providers, a move Mayor Bill de Blasio says will help close the digital divide. The Internet Master Plan would create partnerships between the city and ISPs to facilitate permitting processes and developing infrastructure, such as fiber optic cables. The announcement doesn't mean New York will be creating its own internet service, which cities like Chattanooga, Tennessee, have done in order to attract young people and businesses. Instead, the mayor's office is hoping public-private partnerships will help address a problem that's dogging cities around the country. Market research shows almost a third of US households don't have broadband connections reaching even 25 megabits per second. Chattanooga's service, by contrast, is 40 times faster than that. More than a third of Bronx residents don't have broadband at home, and nearly half of all New Yorkers living in poverty lack home broadband access, the mayor's office said. What's more, 1.5 million New Yorkers have neither a home broadband connection nor a mobile connection on a phone or other device. That prevents residents from accessing job and employment opportunities, and holds back the economy, the mayor's office said.

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Astronomers find a vast structure in our galaxy, made up of many interconnected "star nurseries".

Finland's new Prime Minister has called for the introduction of a flexible working schedule that would involve a four-day week and six-hour days. From a report: Sanna Marin, the youngest female head of government in the world , has announced the intention to trial the initiative, which she claims could be "the next step" in working life. The 34-year-old leads a five party centre-left coalition - all led by women. The Social Democratic Party leader told NewEurope: "I believe people deserve to spend more time with their families, loved ones, hobbies and other aspects of life, such as culture. This could be the next step for us in working life."

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Sprint is officially pulling the plug on its decaying Virgin Mobile prepaid service and will transfer current customers to its Boost Mobile brand starting in February. From a report: The move doesn't come as a complete surprise as Sprint has long been pulling back marketing and distribution for the brand, most recently in October severing ties with Walmart as a distribution partner. Since then Virgin Mobile could only be purchased through an online portal, as Walmart was the last remaining brick-and-mortar sales channel, following earlier decisions in 2019 to pull the brand from Best Buy stores and Meijer. These moves were noticed by Jeffrey Moore at Wave7 Research, who previously predicted that Virgin Mobile was not long for this world. Back in November he told FierceWireless that it had been 31 months since Virgin Mobile had changed its rate card and the brand's press portal hadn't seen an update in 19 months.

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harrymcc writes: This week at CES, Delta is previewing a display technology called parallel reality. Created by a startup called Misapplied Sciences, it uses pixels that can aim different colors at different physical locations, allowing for signage that shows different information to multiple people at the same time. Delta plans to install it at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport by midyear to allow travelers to see just their own travel info rather than a sea of flights. I talked with the CEOs of Delta and Misapplied Sciences, along with others, for a story on the tech over at Fast Company.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Audio company Sonos has sued Google for allegedly copying its patented speaker technology while undercutting it at market. From a report: The New York Times reports that it filed two lawsuits covering five patents on its wireless speaker design. Sonos is also asking for a sales ban on Google's laptops, phones, and speakers in the US through a separate case with the International Trade Commission. Sonos claims that Google stole its multiroom speaker technology after getting access to it through a 2013 partnership. The original partnership would let Sonos speakers support Google Play Music, but the company allegedly used patented technology in its now-discontinued Chromecast Audio device, then continued to use it in the Google Home lineup of smart speakers and the Pixel product lineup. Meanwhile, Sonos says Google subsidized its own products to sell them at a cheaper price while using them to extract more data from buyers.

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REPORTER: What was the name of the contractor who was killed?

POMPEO: Schumann. I believe his friends called him Old Shoe.

Microsoft's GitHub, Mozilla, and Cloudflare have urged India to be transparent about the amendments it is making to an upcoming law that could affect swathes of companies and the way more than half a billion people access information online. From a report: In December 2018, the Indian government proposed changes to its intermediary rules that would require any service that facilitates communication between two or more users and had more than 5 million users in India to set up a local office and have a senior executive in the nation who could be held responsible for any legal issues. The proposal also suggested that any of these services must be able to take down questionable content in within 24 hours and share the user data in within 72 hours of request. Technology giants such as Facebook, Google have so far enjoyed what is known as "safe harbor" laws. The laws, currently applicable in the U.S. under the Communications Decency Act and India through its 2000 Information Technology Act, say that tech platforms won't be held liable for the things their users share on the platform. Several organizations have shared feedback and expressed concerned about the suggested changes in India's intermediary rules. In an open letter addressed to India's IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Tuesday, GitHub, Mozilla, and Cloudflare requested the Indian government to be more transparent about the final amendments it has drafted for the upcoming law. The Indian government has said previously that it would submit the final draft of the proposal to the nation's apex Supreme Court by January 15. But one of the concerning issues with the proposal is that nobody -- except for the government officials -- knows what is in the final draft.

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This cartoon comes closest to describing the dismay of people who did not vote for Trump about people who did. No matter what you may believe, how could crashing the country possibly be better than trying to work together? I'm not talking about parties working together, or news networks, I'm talking about people, American-to-American.

Wherein I report a new feature added yesterday.

• Yesterday I added a new image type to Old School, the blogging platform I use to publish Scripting News. I can now add an image to a post that is not in the right margin, it's centered on the page, above the text that serves as its caption. This is an example of such a post. Then I added a nice border, and padding, and made the text a bit smaller to be more like a caption.

1997: "The press only knows three stories, Apple is dead, Microsoft is evil, and Java is the future." In 2020, Apple is alive, no one worries about Microsoft's character, and Java is no longer the future.

But Facebook? According to journalism, Facebook is a bad place. Facebook is a place you don't want to go. Reality is as the great Yogi Berra said: "No one goes there anymore, it's too crowded." That's Facebook. It isn't any one thing, it's everything.

The scale of Facebook is hard to imagine. To say Facebook is like a low-life bar (something one of my correspondents on Twitter said) would be like saying NYC is a low-life bar -- ridiculous -- NYC has 8.6 million people. It has art museums, libraries, great restaurants, office buildings, millions of homes and families to go with them. Two baseball stadiums. Two airports. Dozens of schools and universities. It's a big place but Facebook is much much much bigger. Let's say Facebook has a billion users. That means it's 125 times the size of NYC. The people who go to Facebook are not low-lifers, they're your friends and family, colleagues, classmates, people in power, retired people, rich and poor, from every continent. What is happening on Facebook? Does anyone have the slightest idea? Even the Facebook company probably only has a very aggregated view of what goes on there.

I have a hunch that Facebook is where journalism is rebooting. I know we're supposed to scoff at the idea of people doing it for themselves, helping each other get the info they need, but if there's going to be a local news desert, something has to fill the gap. Just because professional journalism is leaving localities (which includes non-geographic locales like industries and professions), does that mean we must live without journalism? I think not. We need journalism, and we'll have it, imho.

Professional journalism does not respect online. Look at Farhad Manjoo's latest. What a trip. Some of my friends in Woodstock don't use Facebook for the reasons he outlines. Why? Because they heard it from him, or another NYT reporter or columnist, and believed it. My friends didn't find this out themselves, because if they looked, asked for pointers from friends (for example me), they would have found their people there. If they hang out with evil people, that's probably what they'd find. Or if they live with aging hippies (as in the place I live now) then that's what they'd find. Billions of people can't all be as bad and stupid as a columnist in the NYT says they are. And remember that Manjoo has reasons to want you not to like Facebook. His salary depends on it.