• A Windows PC that costs less than a Windows license unless it doesn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The specs are...  Meh.  It's an Atom CPU, and it's not one of the newer non-sucky Atoms.  But 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage are enough to actually do something useful, and more than enough to run Linux.
  
  
• Speaking of Linux, I set up one of those Binary Lane storage servers I mentioned, and I'm moving my offsite backups over to it right now.
  
  It uses disks and not SSDs, but that doesn't mean it's slow.
  
      # dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test2 bs=1000000 count=10000 10000000000

    bytes (10 GB, 9.3 GiB) copied, 5.70009 s, 1.8 GB/s
  
  I like Binary Lane a lot because they make it dead easy to install your own Linux ISO, so you can partition the storage and configure ZFS. On DigitalOcean you can't easily do that with the included storage, only for attached disks (which aren't particularly cheap).
  
  Ubuntu 20.04 may solve this.
  
  
• Raycraft: A comparison.  (AnandTech)
  
  Screenshots from the new Minecraft beta with Nvidia ray tracing enabled and disabled.  With those little before-and-after slidy things.
  
  It makes a huge difference to the atmosphere of many scenes...  But on the other hand, frequently makes it impossible to actually see anything.
  
  
• Okay, great, but why does it take 16 seconds to boot into BIOS anyway?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• Who do India think they are anyway, Europe?  (TechDirt)
  
  Courts just love to assert jurisdiction over the Universe and all the other places too.
  
  
• If it were more, it wouldn't be a Kindle.  (Six Colors)
  
  E-ink displays just haven't progressed to the point that anyone would want to run an app on them.  Until that changes, Kindles will remain kindles.
  
  
• The i3-9100F as a server CPU.  (Serve the Home)
  
  But, you say, that's a desktop CPU and doesn't support ECC.
  
  That would be true if Intel were at all consistent, but they're not.  Of all the 9th generation desktop CPUs, this one does in fact support ECC memory.
  
  And it's actually not bad.  It outperforms fairly capable low-end server chips from a couple of years ago, like the Xeon E3-1220 V6.
  
  
• Oh look another horrible PHP bug.  (ZDNet)
  
  Ugh.
  
  Only affects Nginx servers running PHP 7, and fortunately I'm not using that combination anywhere.
  
  Good that I know about it, though, because I'm doing a server overhaul at my day job right now, and we do run Nginx and PHP for some legacy apps.  Precisely because they're legacy we haven't upgraded to PHP 7.
  
  
• SMS roaming charges are for the birds.  (BBC)
  
  
• The videos are cool but atmospheric "gravity waves" are not gravity waves.  (CNN)
  
  Eddies in the space-time continuum.
  
  
• An ultra-short-throw projector gets put to the test.  (Ars Technica)
  
  This puppy can project an 80" 4K image given 3" of clearance.  That's kind of neat.  At $2700 it's not cheap - you can get a Sony 75" 4K smart TV for half that - and it's not great if the lights are on, but the flexibility is interesting in itself.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, October 27 2019 07:04 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, October 27 2019 12:31 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, October 27 2019 01:01 PM (Iwkd4)

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