• Was getting decent performance from my experimental VM under PyPy, implemented a couple more instructions, and speed absolutely cratered, dropping from 20 MIPS to 0.33 MIPS in one go.  In fact, PyPy is half the speed of regular Python now.
  
  It's not at all obvious why this is.  I was curious if it was a compiler bug, so I added some more instructions and performance jumped back up to 5 MIPS.
  
  So...  Yeah.  I might want to find a better language for this sooner rather than later.  There's an SDL2 binding for Nim, so that's an option.  Or maybe Go.  I don't want to use C, and Crystal doesn't fully support Windows yet.
  
  I do understand that tight loops full of indirect lookups and branches are tricky to optimise, but if the compiler is as flaky as this I won't be able to make any progress.
  
  Update: Gave Nim a try.  It...  Seems to work.  It looks like it's well-suited to the task, and it's reasonably quick.  It has bounds-checking enabled by default so it's not as fast as C, but that's a really nice feature to have during development.  The bounds checking and subrange types remind me a little of Ada.
  
  Update 2: In fact, Nim has features designed specifically for this sort of thing, like a pragma to force it to compile a case statement as a computed goto.
  
  
  
• AMD released a retail version of the Ryzen 4000 APU and they're sold out already.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It's not clear how much stock they - they being stores in Akihabara in this case - had on hand, but whatever they had they sold on the morning of the first day of release.
  
  
  
• As mentioned previously, AMD is reportedly up to something weird with their next-gen APUs.  The high-performance Cezanne chips will be Zen 3 with Vega graphics, while the low power Van Gogh chips will be Zen 2 and RDNA 2.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Presumably the development timelines of the CPU and GPU cores simply didn't line up.  The new Xbox and PlayStation parts are also Zen 2 with RDNA 2.
  
  Van Gogh will support LPDDR5 and TDPs down to 7.5W, plus a new AI core of some sort.
  
  
  
• A handy guide to de-Googling your life.
  
  Some things are easier than others.  I'm happy with DuckDuckGo 95% of the time, but that last 5% is a sticking point.
  
  
  
• Only two boxes of gluten-free chicken nuggets?  Well, since they were showing as out of stock and I was expecting zero to arrive with this delivery, that's actually an improvement.
  
  
  
• Recycling is a problem.  (Wired)
  
  There are about $3 of recoverable raw materials in a dead solar panel.  It costs about $12 to recover those materials.  It costs about $1 to just chuck the thing in a landfill.

• As mentioned in the comments on yesterday's post, I did a very quick benchmark on a minimal CPU emulator in Python.  On standard Python I got about 3 MIPS, which is more than a 1983 computer would deliver, but not nearly enough when I take into account also emulating the graphics, sound, and I/O chips.  (Plus the fact that it will certainly slow down once I handle things like precisely setting the bits in the F register after every operation.)
  
  Same code in PyPy ran at around 200 MIPS.  So that's how I'll build the prototype.  If that's successful, the real version will be...  I don't know.  Maybe Nim?  Crystal if they get Windows support working?
  
  I'll see if I can implement it once with options for anything from 9 to 13 bits.  I want to have more than 64k directly addressable (without segments or bank switching) but still have somewhat realistic limitations. 
  
  9 bits is pretty good there, since that lets you have something very similar to the Commodore 128, but with all the RAM and ROM immediately accessible with no fussing about.
  
  Also updated the imaginary architecture after checking and discovering that the cycle time for 120ns RAM was 220-230ns, not 200ns as I'd half-remembered.
  
  I'd wanted a 5MHz clock because that works out neatly for the video resolution I have in mind, but that now seems infeasible for a home computer of that period.  The idea instead is that rather than using a 200ns memory cycle, it would have used a 400ns memory cycle but used page mode to read two sequential words in certain modes, including the critical video updates.
  
  The Amiga 1200 used this trick, keeping the same bus cycle as the original Amiga but reading two 32-bit words at a time instead of one 16-bit word.
  
  I looked up the instruction and memory timing of the 6502 to make sure I'm being reasonable with my new 2.5MHz fictional CPU, and it turns out that thing was fucking weird.  (Xania.org)  The 6502 accesses memory on every cycle even if it doesn't yet know what address it wants to read or what value it needs to write.  That means that it will sometimes read the wrong address first, and then the correct one, or write the wrong value followed by the correct one.
  
  Since that article is discussing the creation of a cycle-accurate emulator for the BBC Micro, and that's an interesting and powerful 8-bit system that I'm not very familiar with, I did some reading on the specifics of its hardware.
  
  Turns out...  It had a 250ns memory cycle.  In 1981.  A 2MHz 6502 which as we just noted accesses memory on every cycle, and interleaved access by the video controller with no interference or wait states on either chip.
  
  The Wikipedia article notes that the system needed one specific multiplexer device from National Semiconductor to handle this, and compatible parts from other companies didn't work.  They shipped 1.5 million units without ever figuring out why.
  
  Reading up on the BBC Micro gives me a specific goal, though: This design should be able to run a game like Elite in shaded rather than wireframe mode.  Even if it's generally less powerful than the Amiga, it needs to be able to do that.
  
  
  
• The nearest star-like-object (SLOB) system to ours is still Alpha Centauri.  How dull.
  
  After that it's the roundabout at Barnard's Star, and then Luhman 16, a brown dwarf binary discovered in 2013.
  
  I mention this because a team of volunteers has discovered 95 more nearby brown dwarfs (Space.com) including one with a surface temperature of -23C which is rather chilly for a star, even a failed one.
  
  
  
• Apple has kicked the Wordpress iOS app out of the App Store for not providing non-existent in-app purchases.  (The Verge)
  
  The Wordpress iOS app is a generic app for the Wordpress API.  The source code is all GPL.  It offers no in-app purchases via the App Store or otherwise, but was banned anyway.
  
  
  
• Intel is working on 224G PAM4 transceivers.  (AnandTech)
  
  And also on 112G NRZ transceivers - 112G exists now, but currently uses PAM4.
  
  This new generation would work for PCIe 8.0.  PCIe 3.0 which most of us are still using runs at 8G.  PCIe 2.0 ran at 5G but used inefficient 8b/10b encoding; PCIe 3.0 is much more efficient so at 8G it is about 98% faster than 2.0.
  
  (USB 3.1 gen 2 does the same thing with encoding but actually does double the clock speed, so it is around 2.4x the speed of USB 3.0.)
  
  This new standard would deliver the equivalent of a full x16 PCIe 4.0 slot with just four pins.
  
  Or to put it another way, a PCIe 8.0 x16 slot could read the entire 64k system RAM of my imaginary computer in around 150ns.
  
  
  
• Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is out and it requires all the hardware.  (Guru3D)
  
  You'll need the fastest CPU and graphics card you can find, 32GB RAM, and 150GB of available SSD storage.  And a fast internet connection if you don't want to be waiting for literal days while it downloads, because that 150GB is the initial install size.
  
  Got all that?  Well, with your 9900K and RTX 2080 Ti you'll get 51 FPS at 1080p.
  
  Unless you decide to visit New York, in which case frame rates will plummet to about a third of that.
  
  
  

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• The Intel 80186 arrived in 1982, with 55,000 transistors running at 6MHz in a 68-pin PLCC package.  (Wikipedia)
  
  Why does this matter?  Well, it doesn't, not really.
  
  Just that since I'm unlikely to make any progress on my hardware retrocomputer any time soon, I've been looking at making an emulator for an imaginary computer from the early 80s.  And since it's something that didn't exist, it needs to make sense.  It's intended to be something that would logically have come after the Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum, but before the new era of powerful 16-bit systems like the Mindset, Amiga, and Atari ST.  That puts it in 1983, or at the latest early 1984.
  
  One thing I figured out is that the imaginary video controller chip I envision would need more than 40 pins, which means either a huge 64-pin DIP or a 68-pin PLCC.  Since 68-pin PLCCs obviously existed in that timeframe, I can use an imaginary one with a clear conscience.  (The Amiga, by comparison, divided video control into two 48-pin DIPs.)
  
  My imaginary system is going to have a 10-bit CPU, because (a) that's better than 8 bits without throwing everything wide open, and (b) as far as I can tell no-one has ever done that.  Plenty of 12-bit systems, zero 10-bit.  The closest I could find are John von Neumann's IAS machine (40 bit) and the F14 flight computer (20 bit).
  
  I'll post more details once I get some code that works.
  
  
  
• The Zotac Zbox QCM7T3000 is an almost perfect mini workstation.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It has an 8-core 45w i7 10750H processor and a 6GB Nvidia Quadro RTX 3000 packed into a case that measures just 8" x 8" x 2.5".  And it's almost perfectly symmetrical, with the I/O ports all lovingly paired up EXCEPT THAT THE BACKING PLATES FOR THE TWO ETHERNET PORTS ARE SUBTLY DIFFERENT.
  
  Well, one is 1Gbit and the other is 2.5Gbit, but still.
  
  Two SO-DIMMs, so up to 64GB RAM, one M.2 slot, and one 2.5" drive bay.
  
  
  
• If I suddenly say something has 64K of RAM rather than 64GB, sorry, my mind has been in the early 80s the last few hours.
  
  
  
• Lightroom for iOS considered harmful.  (PetaPixel)
  
  The latest update deleted everyone's photos.
  
  It's not supposed to do that.
  
  
  
• Buried in Intel's recent Xe graphics announcements is the unspoken admission that no-one is going to use this for playing games.  (AnandTech)
  
  Intel is talking up the SG1, a new video streaming accelerator for datacenters.  It will contain four of the Xe chips that will be used in the desktop DG1 card.  The DG1 itself is viewed as a developer platform and not a consumer card.
  
  But Intel have at least announced that the Linux Xe driver code will be open source, like AMD and very unlike Nvidia.
  
  
  
• The upcoming antitrust battles may spell the end for iOS as we know it.  (ZDNet)
  
  And I feel fine.
  
  
  
• The Synology DS1520+ is still gigabit.  (BetaNews)
  
  You're better off in most cases just having someone dump four used DS1812 units on your doorstep.  That happens to everyone, right?
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, August 22 2020 03:32 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, August 22 2020 04:41 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Kurt Duncan at Saturday, August 22 2020 04:54 AM (7AkDP)

4 "Are you suggesting that 11 is one louder?"

I wasn't (11 is the next prime number after , but now I am.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, August 22 2020 09:59 AM (Iwkd4)

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• Intel's Tiger Lake will feature Xe graphics, USB 4, Thunderbolt 4, PCIe 4.0, LPDDR5X, and capacitors.  (AnandTech)
  
  When a CPU company spends more time at Hot Chips talking about their new capacitor design than their new CPU design, that probably means they don't have a new CPU design.  And they don't - sort of.
  
  Willow Cove in Tiger Lake is the same design as Sunny Cove in Ice Lake, but - and this is actually important - Ice Lake sucks.  Clock speeds on Ice Lake are low enough to eat the substantial architectural improvements made over the decades-old Skylake core.
  
  The promise of Tiger Lake, and the reason Intel is talking so much about transistors and capacitors, is not that it's a new design, but that they've finally got their 10nm process working smoothly.
  
  Tiger Lake low-power parts will still only offer four cores, where AMD is already on eight, but should be a significant upgrade over Intel's current lineup.
  
  
  
• Intel also presented details of their upcoming Ice Lake server chips, which share the same now-working 10nm process.  (AnandTech)
  
  Still a maximum of 28 cores when AMD is already at 64, but with improved IPC and AVX512 they at least have a reason to exist.
  
  
  
• Melbourne has just unveiled a brand new 212-storey residential skyscraper.
  
  
  
  
  In Microsoft Flight Simulator.  An error in Open Streetmap produced this rather surprising building code violation in the Melbourne suburbs.
  
  
  
• With TypeScript 4, Microsoft celebrates eight years of putting band-aids on gangrene.  (ZDNet)
  
  Pass.
  
  
  
• With a week still to go on the Eiyuden Kickstarter, the project has unlocked thirty stretch goals.  (Kickstarter)
  
  This is a spiritual successor to Suikoden, a turn-based strategy RPG with about a squillion playable characters.  By the people who wrote Suikoden.  25 years ago.
  
  

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Friday, August 21 2020 01:02 PM (LZ7Bg)

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Tech News

• Despite the name, the A520 chipset is not really a chipset...  Oh.  (AnandTech)
  
  I mean, yes, it does have four SATA ports and nine USB ports and four downstream PCIe lanes and other stuff that looks very much like a chipset would if a chipset could chuck...  Getting off-track again, right.
  
  The other thing to note is that A520 motherboards are PCIe 3.0 only.  As far as I know the chipset can't control that, but only having to qualify for PCIe 3.0 saves money and A520 is the budget lineup.  Also, the desktop APUs are PCIe 3.0, or will be when they manage to crank up production to meet OEM demand.
  
  
  
• Cerebras are working on a new version of their insane pizza-size AI chip.  (AnandTech)
  
  The new model will have 850,000 cores and 2.6 trillion transistors.
  
  Those numbers are large.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has presented their Xbox Series X presentation now.  (AnandTech)
  
  Nothing truly new here since the slide deck was released yesterday, but a lot of the little details are filled in.  For example, the built-in DSP can mix 300 sound sources simultaneously into 3D positional audio.
  
  
  
• With Intel's 660p and 665p both assigned to the dustbin, is it Western Digital's time to shine in the $100 per TB NVMe niche?  Yes.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They benchmark both the 500GB and 1TB models.  The 1TB model turns out to be significantly faster under sustained write loads, simply because it has more flash chips to share the work.  When its SLC cache is exhausted, write speeds drop to "only" 880MB per second.
  
  
  
• Baldur's Gate 3 hits early access on September 30.  (Tech Powerup)
  
  Only 17 years late.  I know how that can happen.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 19 2020 11:53 PM (Iwkd4)

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• Looking for a 4K laptop but don't want to spend $1500 on that rather nice HP model?
  
  How about $559?  (Amazon)
  
  The Chuwi AeroBook Pro has a 15" 4K display, 8GB RAM, and a 256GB SSD.  The RAM is not upgradeable but it has two M.2 slots, one SATA which is used by the included SSD, and an empty NVMe slot.
  
  The CPU is a dual-core Core i5 6287U, and the graphics are...  Integrated.  So nice screen aside you do get what you pay for.
  
  
  
• IBM's Power10 provides a number of cores per socket with a number of threads per core and a number of sockets per system.  (AnandTech)
  
  This is slightly complicated.  The chip - a 600mm² device built on Samsung's 7nm process - comes in two variants.  The first has 15 cores and 8 threads per core - SMT8; the second has 30 cores and 4 threads per core - SMT4.
  
  The SMT8 cores have double the everything of the SMT4 cores - twice the execution units, twice the cache, twice the issue width, but in exchange you get half as many.  Both versions of the chip total 30MB L2 cache and 120MB L3 cache.
  
  The processor package itself comes in two variants, with either one or two of those dies, which in turn come in the two variants mentioned above.  These two package variants are single-chip modules - SCM - and dual-chip modules - DCM - respectively.
  
  A server built on SCM can have up to 16 sockets; a server built on DCM is denser but can only have 4 sockets, because some of the CPU-to-CPU links are used to link the two dies inside each socket.
  
  It supports PCIe 5.0, and uses an off-chip memory controller with up to 1TB per second bandwidth, so the same CPU can support DDR4 and DDR5 with the right memory controller.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the z15 is a 12-core processor with hardware gzip.  (AnandTech)
  
  IBM's latest mainframe CPU is built on a 14nm process - the mainframe parts are always one generation behind, deliberately - and runs at 5.2GHz.  It's not hugely faster than the z14 on standard benchmarks, but adds dedicated acceleration hardware for common bottlenecks such as sorting, compression, and encryption.
  
  And it has 960MB of L4 cache on a second die.
  
  The reason for running one of these is that it can detect hardware failures in the middle of an instruction, and swap the thread to a good core without missing a beat.
  
  Which means that instead of 99.9% of your problems being software rather than hardware, 99.9999% of your problems will be software rather than hardware.
  
  Which is in turn why companies still run Cobol.
  
  
  
• Marvell's ThunderX3 delivers 60 Arm cores and 90MB of cache in a single chip.  (AnandTech)
  
  The cores are SMT4 as well, which Marvell says gives them a 60% performance boost on heavily-threaded workloads, for only a 5% increase in die area over a single-threaded design.  It looks like that's where much of the engineering effort went; the core is otherwise a relatively standard 4-issue design, where Arm's newest is 5-issue and Apple are doing 6-issue.
  
  Still, that means that ThunderX4 could add some significant single-threaded performance gains to that 60% multi-threaded improvement.
  
  
  
• The memory controller on the Xbox Series X chip is bigger than the CPU cores.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Looking at that die photo, it's not even close.  Of course the chip is mostly GPU, but the CPU cores don't even make it to second place.
  
  Microsoft hasn't done their Hot Chip presentation yet, but released the slide deck in advance, so there will be more info on this one tomorrow.
  
  
  
• Quite appropriately, a new biography of Dave Brubeck doesn't mention his birth until page 302.  (The TLS)
  
  Even his life story runs to unconventional time signatures.
  
  
  
• Apple and Google are back to playing notice me senpai with antitrust regulators.  (Engadget)
  
  Epic Games - a sucky company itself - put an option into Fortnite to buy fortbux or whatever they're called without paying Apple and Google their 30% protection fee.
  
  Google removed Fortnite from the Play Store, though it can still be side-loaded.
  
  Apple removed Fortnite from the iOS App Store, from the Mac App Store, and has threatened to pull all of Epic's developer access and revoke their code-signing certificates, which would kill Fortnite for everyone who already has it installed on iOS.
  
  Epic, who were already suing Apple over their removal from the App Store, has filed another lawsuit over the developer access issue.
  
  Apple are being absurdly heavy-handed here.  I don't know who is handling developer relations at Cupertino, but whoever it is, is very, very, very bad at their job.
  
  
  
• In other Apple antitrust fuckery news, the company has expanded its independent repair program to include Macs.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Let's see what our friend Louis has to say about this program:
  
  
  
  Oh.  So it's more of a non-independent non-repair program.  How non-typical.
  
  
  
• Oracle is in talks to acquire TikTok.  (CNBC)
  
  For the love of God, why?
  
  

Special Bonus Crack Team of Science Babes Anime Music Video of the Day Just for Brickmuppet

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, August 19 2020 01:59 AM (LADmw)

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• A look at that new HP Envy with its 4K AMOLED display.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a pretty nice configuration: Core i7-10750H (6 cores / 12 threads, 5GHz boost clock), 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD plus 32GB Optane (?), RTX 2060 Max-Q, and the aforementioned 15" 4K screen.  It weighs a reasonably light 2.1kg and costs a reasonably light $1500.
  
  And it has the four essential keys in a nice layout.
  
  Colour gamut is 143% of DCI-P3, which is crazy.  My iMac is ninety-something percent of DCI-P3 and it shows colours I'd never seen before on a computer monitor.  Maybe my next system will have an OLED screen.
  
  RAM is in two SO-DIMM slots and can be upgraded to 64GB; storage is in two M.2 slots and can be upgraded to 16TB.
  
  Battery life is the downside: Just a little over five hours.  Nice as it is, I'd hold off for the next generation from Intel - or the current generation from AMD.
  
  
  
• Notepad++ has been banned in China.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Good for you, Notepad++.  Though I hope you didn't do another of those weird scrolling text announcements that made a million users think they had a virus.
  
  
  
• IBM has announced the Power10.  (IBM)
  
  Wait, when's Hot Chips this year?  Oh.  It's now.
  
  I expect Ian Cutress at AnandTech will be along tomorrow to analyse all the goings on; the IBM press release is mostly fluff.
  
  
  
• Google News may disappear from Australia.  (Gizmodo)
  
  Okay.

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, August 17 2020 11:16 PM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 18 2020 12:17 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 18 2020 12:18 AM (Iwkd4)

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Posted by: normal at Tuesday, August 18 2020 01:08 AM (LADmw)

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• When backwards compatibility is Job One.  (Medium)
  
  Steve Yegge is not happy with Google.  Google is notorious for shutting down user-facing services, but they take the same approach to business-facing services with Google Cloud.
  
  He notes that Java is still supporting features that were deprecated 22 years ago, while a feature deprecation notice from Google Cloud is like a death flag for an otome game villainess: The only hope is to make better choices in your next life.
  
  
  
• A California court has found that Amazon is liable for damage caused by defective products sold by third-parties through their marketplace.  (California Globe)
  
  While my first instinct is to assume the California court got it completely wrong, I'm not sure that is the case.  And if it will get rid of the flood of fake SD cards I will applaud.
  
  Though I doubt anything can get rid of the fake SD cards.
  
  
  

Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Monday, August 17 2020 02:21 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Monday, August 17 2020 02:25 AM (obo9H)

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Posted by: Rick C at Monday, August 17 2020 02:41 AM (Iwkd4)

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• I didn't post yesterday's update until this morning and now there's no news for today.  Oh well.
  
  
  
• A few more notes on the RTX 3090 and GDDR6X.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It will be the first card to deliver 1TB per second of bandwidth without using HBM.  A 384-bit bus and 21Gbps signalling makes for 1008GBps.
  
  The card will come with 12GB of RAM in 12 8Gbit chips.  Micron will ship 16Gbit GDDR6X parts next year with speeds up to 24Gbps.
  
  
  
• Writing your own virtual machine.  (GitHub)
  
  As in, writing a virtual microprocessor, rather than the container kind of virtual machine.
  
  This is a pretty easy task if (a) you don't need to deliver perfect compatibility with an existing processor and (b) you're not aiming for ultimate performance.
  
  I wrote a simple VM in C++ a couple of years back and got it to nudge 1 TFLOPS single-threaded on a 2015 iMac without any clever tricks.  That was when I was still looking at writing my own programming language, before Crystal came along and filled that niche.
  
  If I do it again, first I'd probably write it in Crystal (it's nearly as fast as C and much nicer to user), and second I'd do it as a virtual fantasy retro-computer, a 10-bit or 12-bit home computer that never was.
  
  Put it into a tiny Linux distro, plop the whole thing on a Chuwi Larkbox, and you have your very own retrocomputer without ever having picked up a soldering iron.
  
  
  
• Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS now includes the Linux 5.4 LTS kernel from Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.  (9to5Linux)
  
  I guess LTS stands for long-term support and not long-term stable.  RedHat back-ports bugfixes and security patches to older kernels while maintaining 100% compatibility; Ubuntu seems to just keeping the user space the same.
  
  
  
• Fun fact: Semi-automatic rifles with large (20 round) magazines were first invented in the Holy Roman Empire.
  
  
  
• Twitter seems to have hired Clippy to enforce self-censorship.
  
  
  
  
  In case Twitter is misbehaving:
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Sunday, August 16 2020 02:15 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 16 2020 11:00 AM (Iwkd4)

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• Micron has announced GDDR6X.  (AnandTech)
  
  The new memory will be showing up very soon on Nvidia's RTX 3090.  It achieves effective speeds of 21Gbits per second per pin using PAM4 encoding - four signalling levels rather than binary.  Since it's also DDR, the actual clock speed is 5.25GHz.
  
  PCIe 6.0 will also use PAM4 encoding.  It's more complex and expensive to implement, but routing 32GHz signals across a motherboard wouldn't exactly be a walk in the park either.  I wouldn't be surprised if this approach ends up in DDR6 in a few years.
  
  The same announcement from Micron also mentioned HBMNext, but gave no details other than an expected delivery date of late 2022.
  
  
  
• The A520 is not a chipset.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  All Ryzen CPUs and APUs - including Threadripper and Epyc - have built-in USB and SATA controllers and can be run without a chipset.  That's what the A520 (and A320) designation really means.
  
  These boards from ASRock do seem to at least have an extra USB controller though.
  
  
  
• $99 gas fees are crippling DeFi.  (CoinTelegraph)
  
  DeFi is decentralised finance, and it mostly runs as Ethereum, which is the only major, stable, completely decentralised blockchain that is smart enough to execute arbitrary contracts completely on-chain.
  
  You can define the contract code, publish it so that anyone can verify it, and execute it automatically, publicly, between any two (or even more) parties.  Really neat.
  
  Only problem is, Ethereum is fucked.
  
  
  
  
  Not only has the gas price spiked to over 300 in the last 48 hours, it has varied by a factor of 40x in the space of just two hours.  You can't plan anything.
  
  Ethereum contract coding is one of my roles at my day job.  Switching back an forth between the strange world of Ethereum and more conventional applications drives me crazy, but it's good to still have work to do when Ethereum is basically dead.
  
  
  
• The first regular mission for SpaceX's Crew Dragon is set for October 23.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  After a safe and successful flight test, it will take its full complement of four astronauts up to the ISS.
  
  The internal photos of this thing are so weird.  It looks like a spaceship, not like the traditional tin can held together by stubbornness.
  
  
  
• Intel has confirmed it will ship server CPUs with DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 next year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  PCIe 4.0 will come to Intel's laptop and desktop parts later this year with Tiger Lake.
  
  Ice Lake server parts will also ship this year with PCIe 4.0 (Serve the Home) even though that would imply a server generation lasting only 12 months.  That would not make vendors happy, but little Intel has done lately has made vendors happy, so it might well be real.
  
  
  
• A second run of the ZX Spectrum Next has been funded on Kickstarter - four times over - in just 48 hours.  (BBC News)
  
  It's a nice looking unit, with a custom injection-molded case.
  
  This version features a few improvements over the original.  (Kickstarter)
  
  A 28MHz Z80n CPU (implemented on an FPGA, though you can buy real Z80 chips at 20MHz), 1MB RAM, HDMI, WiFi, and three AY-3-8912 sound chips.
  
  
  
• Beta testers of SpaceX's Starlink network are reporting speeds that don't suck.  (Ars Technica)
  
  60Mb down and 18Mb up is a lot better than I had at the start of the year, and in fact not that much worse than what I have now.  31ms local latency is worse, but most of my pings are to the US and take more than 180ms anyway.
  
  
  
• Web browsers need to stop.  (Drew DeVault)
  
  The one bright spot was Firefox, and Mozilla just fired 250 people.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Including a lot of the people needed to keep Firefox a robust alternative to the depredations of Google.  (Android Police)
  
  And this even though Mozilla will be receiving at least $2 billion from Google over the next five years.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  
  
• Speaking of Mozilla, someone put a lifeboat together for fired Mozilla staff literally overnight.  (Mozilla Lifeboat)
  
  Including the animated red panda in a little boat.  Impressive work.  It's not a hugely complicated site but everything about it looks great.
  
  
  
• Filed under Things No-one Asked For: Gmail now supports video conferencing.  (ZDNet)
  
  Yes, Hangouts is a pile of crap, but why not fix that rather than shoe-horn the crap into something that mostly works?
  
  
  
• Google has stopped regarding the Hong Kong police as a legitimate law enforcement authority.  (CNet)
  
  Nice to see they still have some limits.
  
  
  
• YouTube has banned videos discussing information relevant to the 2020 election that was obtained by hacking.  (CNet)
  
  This will be enforced with the same degree of impartiality as all of YouTube's rules, which is to say, fuck anyone to the right of Friedrich Engels.
  
  
  
• YAM is baked.  (The Register)
  
  The new cryptocurrency has effectively declared itself autonomous from human control due to a tiny bug.  Because of how all this nonsense works, that bug cannot ever be fixed and all the money put into it has simply evaporated.
  
  One of the things I sweated blood over in the last Ethereum contract I built was a secure mechanism for regaining control if things went wrong.  There is a mechanism to do that generally - upgradeable contracts - but they basically don't work.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Saturday, August 15 2020 06:52 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, August 15 2020 08:20 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, August 15 2020 11:46 PM (obo9H)

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