Month: December 2020

The series 12 finale of Doctor Who back in March ended on a cliffhanger, with Jodie Whittaker's Thirteenth Doctor imprisoned and her loyal companions (or "fam") back on Earth without her. Fortunately, we don't have much longer to wait to find out what happens. The BBC dropped the official trailer for the upcoming holiday special, Revolution of the Daleks, slated to air on New Year's Day.

(Spoilers for S12 below.)

As I noted in my review earlier this year, series 12 felt like classic Doctor Who, to the delight of longtime fans disappointed by Whittaker's first outing. (I thought that first outing was solid and showed a lot of promise.) In the episode "Fugitive of the Judoon," the Doctor encountered the intergalactic police force-for-hire, the Judoon (introduced in the series three episode "Smith and Jones"). The Judoon were supposedly hunting a man who lived in Gloucester with his wife, Ruth (Jo Martin). But their true target turned out to be Ruth, who recovered lost memories and declared herself to be the Doctor, with her own buried blue police box TARDIS. Yet neither Doctor had any recollection of the other.

Enlarge / Slack is evaporating into the Salesforce cloud, you could say. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Salesforce, a cloud-services company that targets businesses, has announced that it will acquire workplace communication service Slack for $27.7 billion. The announcement follows a week of rumors and a steep bump in Slack's value on the stock market in anticipation of the deal being made official.

Neither company has yet to announce in any detail what this will mean for users and customers. Salesforce is sure to include Slack in some of its broader bundles and, to more tightly integrate Slack with its other software services, "Slack will be deeply integrated into every Salesforce Cloud" and will become "the new interface for Salesforce Customer 360," the press release says.

But anything else beyond that is speculation at this point. New features and development priorities or adjusted pricing models are possibilities, but we also don't yet know when any user-relevant changes related to this acquisition will actually take place, either.

Enlarge / OpenZFS 2.0.0 brings a ton of new features and performance improvements to both Linux and BSD platforms. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

This Monday, ZFS on Linux lead developer Brian Behlendorf published the OpenZFS 2.0.0 release to Github. Along with quite a lot of new features, the announcement brings an end to the former distinction between "ZFS on Linux" and ZFS elsewhere (for example, on FreeBSD). This move has been a long time coming—the FreeBSD community laid out their side of the roadmap two years ago—but this is the release that makes it official.

Availability

The new OpenZFS 2.0.0 release is already available on FreeBSD, where it can be installed from ports (overriding the base system ZFS) on FreeBSD 12 systems, and will be the base FreeBSD version in the upcoming FreeBSD 13. On Linux, the situation is a bit more uncertain and depends largely on the Linux distro in play.

Users of Linux distributions which use DKMS-built OpenZFS kernel modules will tend to get the new release rather quickly. Users of the better-supported but slower-moving Ubuntu probably won't see OpenZFS 2.0.0 until Ubuntu 21.10, nearly a year from now. For Ubuntu users who are willing to live on the edge, the popular but third-party and individually-maintained jonathonf PPA might make it available considerably sooner.

Enlarge / All of 2020's tropical storms and hurricanes in a single image. (credit: NOAA)

Monday was the last "official" day of the Atlantic hurricane season, drawing down the curtain on what has been a frenetic year for storms forming in the Atlantic Ocean, Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean Sea.

The top-line numbers are staggering: there were a total of 30 tropical storms and hurricanes, surpassing the previous record of 28 set in the year 2005. For only the second time, forecasters at the National Hurricane Center in Miami ran out of names and had to resort to using the Greek alphabet.

Of all those storms, 12 made landfall in the United States, obliterating the previous record of nine landfalling tropical storms or hurricanes set in 1916. The state of Louisiana alone experienced five landfalls. At least part of the state fell under coastal watches or warnings for tropical activity for a total of 474 hours this summer and fall. And Laura became the strongest hurricane to make landfall in the Pelican State since 1856.

Amazon Web Services and Apple have partnered to bring modern cloud-provisioning capabilities to the macOS platform, with Tuesday morning's launch of the new mac1.metal ECS instance type. In something of a departure from Amazon's usual cloud fare, the new instance types aren't virtual machines at all—they're Mac Mini systems, bolted in pairs to 1U rack-mount sleds.

No, these aren't Apple Silicon systems—the Minis in question are the Intel-based model, each with a Core i7-8700B 6c/12t CPU, 32GiB RAM, and 10Gbps network interface. The mac1.metal instances don't offer local storage, instead relying on Elastic Block Storage (EBS) accessed at 8Gbps via high-speed Thunderbolt 3. Customer provisioning, billing, and out-of-band management are handled via Amazon's Nitro offboard system, in peripherals mounted on the sleds and connected via the Minis' external interfaces.

Although there's no virtualization in play here, the mac1.metal instances can be spun up and down nearly as rapidly, thanks to the AWS Nitro hardware management—which is invisible, from the customer's perspective. To someone who spins up a mac1.metal instance, the instance is for all intents and purposes a perfectly vanilla, brand-new Intel Mac Mini.