Ambient Irony

Saturday, September 14

Daily News Stuff 13 September 2019

Democratic Debate The Animation Edition

Tech News

Endless Space is free at Humble Bundle for the next 24 hours.

You just need to sign up for their newsletter. Your email address has probably been leaked a thousand times by now anyway.
Xiaomi's Mi 9 has (reads specs) no headphone jack. (AnandTech)

Please stop doing that.
Sega's Genesis Mini comes with 42 games for $80. (Ars Technica)

That price is a bit high for the hardware - it's just another emulator running on a cheap Arm microcontroller - but it includes two controllers and the bundled game lineup looks solid. I never owned a Sega console but I recognise most of the game titles even so.
AMD's twelve-core Threadripper 1920X was discounted to $199 at Amazon. (Tom's Hardware)

Two problems: First, it requires an expensive motherboard that looks likely to be obsoleterated very soon, and second, I say was. It's already out of stock.
Asus' dual screen Zenbook Pro gets a full review. (Tom's Hardware)

No PgUp/PgDn/Home/End keys on this one. They have an excuse - there's not much room because they had to move the trackpad to the right of the keyboard to squeeze in the second screen above.

I harp on this because my own fairly nice Dell laptop with its 4k screen doesn't have those keys either. I used to have a keyboard and monitor in the office so the days I was working there I would plug those in and everything would be great. But now we don't have a permanent office because most of the Sydney-based staff worked from home anyway, and it turns out that not having those keys drives me nuts when I'm trying to code.

And my new HP laptops don't have those keys either. Sigh.
Early Pleistocene enamel proteome from Dmanisi resolves Stephanorhinus phylogeny. (Nature)

Well good, because that's been bugging me.
ChocoPy is a subset of Python 3 designed for teaching compiler construction.

Only problems are the compiler is written in Java and it compiles to Risc-V, which makes it basically useless.
King Canute eat your heart out: France wants to block Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency at the border. (ZDNet)

Video of the Day

Earlier this year there was a video from David Murray, The 8-bit Guy, discussing his dream retrocomputer.

Now he and a busy little team of hardware and software hackers are making it.

While the specs are still subject to revision, it looks like it will be an 8 MHz 6502 with 128K of ROM and 2MB of RAM - about 40K direct mapped and the rest bank switched - and an FPGA for video. They have both an emulator and working prototype hardware.

The 6502 is not a good CPU, but it's a very familiar CPU to a lot of programmers, and that has huge benefits.

Disclaimer: Remember that stuff about crazy people and bad code? The internet is that except itâ€™s literally a billion times worse. Websites that are glorified shopping carts with maybe three dynamic pages are maintained by teams of people around the clock, because the truth is everything is breaking all the time, everywhere, for everyone. Right now someone who works for Facebook is getting tens of thousands of error messages and frantically trying to find the problem before the whole charade collapses. Thereâ€™s a team at a Google office that hasnâ€™t slept in three days. Somewhere thereâ€™s a database programmer surrounded by empty Mountain Dew bottles whose husband thinks sheâ€™s dead. And if these people stop, the world burns.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:20 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 It seems silly to write a compiler in Java that doesn't produce JVM bytecode.

Posted by: Jay at Saturday, September 14 2019 01:20 PM (vuQH5)

2 Something that you can actually run once you've got your compiler working would be nice, yeah. I guess there are Risc-V emulators around at least.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 14 2019 01:25 PM (PiXy!)

3 That sounds like someone not familiar with college professors would say. smile