Dear Santa, thank you for the dolls and pencils and the fish. It's Easter now, so I hope I didn't wake you but... honest, it is an emergency. There's a crack in my wall. Aunt Sharon says it's just an ordinary crack, but I know its not cause at night there's voices so... please please can you send someone to fix it? Or a policeman, or...
Back in a moment.
Thank you Santa.
Back in a moment.
Thank you Santa.
Thursday, May 20
Daily News Stuff 20 May 2021
Quis Cancellare Ipsos Fuckbiscuits Edition
Speaking of patrolling the sewers of Plague City, anime of the day is Black Lagoon from 2006.
It's great.
Quis Cancellare Ipsos Fuckbiscuits Edition
Top Story
- They addressed the email to "Quis".
I said I would hang around Twitter and poke the bear until they kicked me out, so I shouldn't be surprised if the bear occasionally takes a swipe at me, particularly when the bear is a terrorist-sympathising communist with a room-temperature IQ.
Did I break the rules? Obviously not. But that doesn't matter; it's a seven-day suspension and their appeals process takes more than seven days and results in an automatic rejection anyway. Been there. Done that.
To be accused is to be tried, convicted, and punished.... Punished by having a week off from patrolling the sewers of Plague City.
Oh no.
It's great.
Tech News
- Libera.Chat is a new IRC network formed from the ashes of Freenode. (Libera.Chat)
Freenode had been around since 1998, maintained by a staff of volunteers. It had a legal corporation formed to allow it to hold real-world conferences, and that was sold under unexplained circumstances to a holding company in 2017.
Recently the holding company decided this meant it owned the network, so the entire volunteer staff said fuck you and left.
The same shady corporate structure owns VPN provider Private Internet Access, so probably give them a miss as well.
- Telegram founder Paul Dirov says Apple users are "digital slaves". (WCCFTech)
Well, yes.
- Hetzner - a major European hosting provider - has banned cyrpto mining. (Bleeping Computer)
I've mentioned before that Chia will fry low-end consumer SSDs, but you're just fine on hard drives or enterprise SSDs... Says the founder of Chia, who totally wouldn't have a stake in this.
- Google is supporting RSS again. (Thurrott.com)
At some point and in some form. Maybe. There's an experimental feature currently in the Android version of the Chrome canary release that only works in the US, so thanks, Google, that really helps me test it.
- Android 12 targets the iPhone's biggest weakness. (ZDNet)
More open? Longer update guarantees? Better support for third-party app stores?
Nope. You can change the colours of the UI.
- MacOS is also the sewers of Plague City says... Apple's Senior Vice President for Software Development. (9to5Mac)
This is another gem coming out of Epic's lawsuit over Apple's digital slavery. (Note that no-one cares much about Apple's real-world slavery. No lawsuits for them.)
Apple is so determined to protect their theft of 30% of everything the comes within 400 yards of the App Store that they are willing to throw the entire Mac division under the bus.
Though they've been working privately towards that goal for years, so I guess it's really nothing new except for the public announcement.
- China has banned financial services providers from having anything to do with cryptocurrencies. (CNBC)
The price of Bitcoin plunged 30% on the news, from $insanity to $insanity-30%.
This is, of course, entirely about power. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are massively popular in China because they allow some glimpse of an illusion of escaping the totalitarian regime that runs the country. The totalitarian regime of course cannot permit that.
- The EU Parliament has adopted a report demanding 24x7 takedowns of pirate streams with a 30-minute mandatory resolution time. (TorrentFreak)
There's no way that's not going to cause problems.
Disclaimer: BAN ALL THE THINGS!
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Twitter Also In The Apiary Also With A Lead Pipe
Looks like I'm on double secret probation.
Looks like I'm on double secret probation.
Again.
Siding with terrorists: Absolutely fine.
Criticising people for siding with terrorists: 7 day suspension.
Criticising people for siding with terrorists: 7 day suspension.
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Google In The Apiary With A Lead Pipe
The server was getting overloaded with crappy requests again, but I couldn't see any difference between the crappy requests overloading the server and the usual crappy requests that only take about 50 milliseconds and cause no problems at all.
Except that we were also getting indexed by Google and the Google bot was tracking links to RSS feeds in places where RSS feeds don't really belong but the server will do its best to fulfil anyway.
So I blocked a couple of those. Not all of them, just a couple.
And the problem was resolved.
The server was getting overloaded with crappy requests again, but I couldn't see any difference between the crappy requests overloading the server and the usual crappy requests that only take about 50 milliseconds and cause no problems at all.
Except that we were also getting indexed by Google and the Google bot was tracking links to RSS feeds in places where RSS feeds don't really belong but the server will do its best to fulfil anyway.
So I blocked a couple of those. Not all of them, just a couple.
And the problem was resolved.
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Wednesday, May 19
Daily News Stuff 19 May 2021
Yes We Have No Minecraft Edition
Anime of the day is Patlabor, and here specifically the 7-episode OVA series from 1988. This was followed up by a TV series, a second OVA series, three movies - I've only seen the second one, I think, but it is very good, albeit darker and more political than the OVA.
It's Luna Varga, a four-episode OVA from 1991.
Yes, Luna is sitting on the forehead of an enormous rampaging dinosaur. Let's go with that. This is Japan, there certainly wouldn't be anything weird going on.
With video cards in desperately short supply, it's tempting to buy a pre-built system from a major OEM rather than build your own.
But don't buy a Dell G5 5000, because it's such a piece of poop they had to break the review into two episodes to cover all the problems.
Yes We Have No Minecraft Edition
Top Story
- Which weird hybrid SSD should you buy? (AnandTech)
The short answer is no, but in fact both drives have particular strengths that produce convincing wins on certain benchmarks.
The Enmotus FuzeDrive has 128GB of SLC cache to speed up its 1.4TB of QLC storage. QLC flash is cheap but slow; SLC flash is, unsurprisingly, exactly four times as expensive, but can be more than four times as fast in certain cases.
Where this drive shines is when it's full. Consumer SSDs slow down significantly when they're full, because they have to spend more and more time erasing and remapping blocks to store new data. Because the FuzeDrive always writes to its very fast SLC cache and only later flushes to the main QLC storage, it never really slows down at all, even when it's 99% full.
The Intel H20 pairs up to 1TB of QLC flash with 32GB of Optane storage - another technology entirely. The H20 doesn't excel at bandwidth tests because the flash and Optane halves of the drive are on separate PCIe lanes, each getting only half of the available bandwidth.
But on latency tests - how long it takes to read a single, small chunk of data - it is up to five times faster than a regular SSD.
On the third hand, this drive only works with an 11th gen Intel CPU, a 500-series chipset, and a special driver. Lacking any of those what you have is - at best - a third rate and severely overpriced SSD.
Tech News
- movcc is a C compiler. (GitHub)
This one is slightly different to your typical C compiler, though: The code it produces consists exclusively of MOV instructions. MOV on the x86 architecture (and many other designs) is Turing complete, so although no-one sane would want to do so, you can write any program with just that one instruction.Q: Why did you make this? A: I thought it would be funny.
- Chrome can now automatically fix stolen passwords. (Tech Crunch)
If Google detects that a password you've saved is out in the wild, Chrome will automatically log in to that site with the old passwords, generate a new password, replace the old with the new, and remember the new one for you.
They're only doing this for certain specific whitelisted sites at the moment, but nowhere in the article does it mention opting in to the program. That question doesn't even seem to occur to these people.
- Ethereum's switch from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake will cut power consumption by more than 99%. (Crypto Briefing)
When this will happen is another question entirely. There's good money right now in mining Ethereum, and this change will erase that. The miners are not enthused at the prospect.
Without this change, though, Ethereum is dead. Recent spikes in the price of ETH and load on the blockchain have pushed the cost of even the simplest transactions over $20.
- Twitter is now co-operating with Russia. (TorrentFreak)
The Russian authorities have already been spying on Twitter traffic and throttling the bandwidth to force the company to comply.
I'd be far more sympathetic with Russia if they'd just banned Twitter for causing rats in laboratory cancer, or with Twitter if they just told Russia to go fuck themselves with a railroad spike, but neither of those much desired outcomes actually eventuated.
Bonus Anime Opening Video of the Day
It's Luna Varga, a four-episode OVA from 1991.
Yes, Luna is sitting on the forehead of an enormous rampaging dinosaur. Let's go with that. This is Japan, there certainly wouldn't be anything weird going on.
Dude, Don't Get A Dell Video of the Dell
With video cards in desperately short supply, it's tempting to buy a pre-built system from a major OEM rather than build your own.
But don't buy a Dell G5 5000, because it's such a piece of poop they had to break the review into two episodes to cover all the problems.
Disclaimer: Yes we have no Minecraft, we have no Minecraft streams today. And someone please tell Ollie she was logging in to a ghost server.
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Waiting For Inadot
Ina (of Hololive EN) slept in and missed her scheduled Minecraft stream - by two hours - and Kiara (also of Hololive EN) started her own stream and spent two hours roasting her.
With a cup of coffee in hand her virtual legs up on her virtual desk. Only Live2D doesn't actually do that so the legs don't move when her body does - though they do move independently which is just slightly disconcerting.
Ina still has 15,000 people waiting after now two and a half hours, and Kiara's roast got over 30,000 live viewers.
I checked The Hololive Minecraft stream index, saw Ina had streamed, clicked on the link, and thought YouTube was broken because it was showing me the "waiting for livestream" message rather than replaying it.
Ina (of Hololive EN) slept in and missed her scheduled Minecraft stream - by two hours - and Kiara (also of Hololive EN) started her own stream and spent two hours roasting her.
With a cup of coffee in hand her virtual legs up on her virtual desk. Only Live2D doesn't actually do that so the legs don't move when her body does - though they do move independently which is just slightly disconcerting.
Ina still has 15,000 people waiting after now two and a half hours, and Kiara's roast got over 30,000 live viewers.
I checked The Hololive Minecraft stream index, saw Ina had streamed, clicked on the link, and thought YouTube was broken because it was showing me the "waiting for livestream" message rather than replaying it.
Then I checked my YouTube subscriptions and saw Kiara had an ongoing livestream titled "waiting for ina!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" and guessed something was up.
Normally Ina's Minecraft streams start around 6AM Sydney time and are over by the time I'm free of morning meetings and have time to listen to something while I work, so this actually worked out well for me.
And Ollie is scheduled to invade the EN Minecraft server at lunch time.
And Ollie is scheduled to invade the EN Minecraft server at lunch time.
Update: And now YouTube is broken at least in this part of the world, from Australia to Indonesia, and Ollie had to reschedule her invasion of the EN server for the second time. Which wouldn't have gone entirely to plan anyway because she was logging into their old realms account and they've moved to a dedicated server now.
Also, this server - blogs, not Minecraft - is undergoing that weird distributed malformed requests attack again. Seems to have recovered but the load average spiked to about 50 for a while.
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Tuesday, May 18
Daily News Stuff 18 May 2021
The Way We Weren't Edition
Anime of the day is Galaxy Fraulein Yuna. It's not a classic, it didn't change the course of the industry, and it didn't spark nineteen alternate universes, though the original 1995 two-part OVA did get a three-episode sequel in 1997.
I just happen to like it.
This is a scene-for-scene remake of the redo version of the classic AMV by Nic Neidenbach from 2001, using the recent Blu-Ray release of El Hazard.
This is the redo version, and you can see that whoever was in charge of the Blu-Ray release did an absolutely stellar job.
Disclaimer: Haba haba mori mori.
The Way We Weren't Edition
Top Story
- On June 8 the signal goes out and millions of Amazon Alexa and Echo devices will start turning everything around them into paperclips. (Inc)
Well, more precisely, every single Alexa and Echo device that hasn't been explicitly opted out will combine to form a single world-spanning mesh network.
This was the plot of a Matt Smith episode of Doctor Who. In fact, this was the plot of two Matt Smith episodes of Doctor Who, and also two David Tennant episodes, and a William Hartnell story, and a couple of Jon Pertwee stories as well.
I just happen to like it.
Tech News
- Intel's Tiger Lake-H high-end laptop parts are here-ish. So how do they perform? (AnandTech)
That's kind of complicated. They're not bad, performance-wise, but they sure are power-hungry. Configured with a 65W TDP they compete evenly with a 35W AMD part.
On the one hand, they seem to be held back from their full potential because the reference laptop design overheats when running at 65W.
On the other hand, the reference laptop design overheats when running at 65W.
- Ah, Amazon S3 access policies, you're just as fucked up as the day we met, about two trillion dollars ago.
- There may be a very minor Ryzen 5000 refresh on the way. (Tom's Hardware)
Similar to the 3000XT models. The advantage this refresh would have is that it could bump AMD over the 5GHz line, which they haven't crossed since the FX-9590, a 220W monster that despite its power draw was only just competitive with Intel's chips of the day.
- Breakthrough research has finally linked Linear A to Linear B. (Greek Reporter)
Linear B was used in Mycenaean Greece, and is the oldest form of written Greek. Once it was determined that the language was in fact Greek, scholars in the 1950s - well, actually it was initially one English architect - were able to map certain words to place names that persist today and from there decipher the entire script.
Linear B is adapted from Linear A, the script used to write inscriptions in Minoan Crete. We have over 1400 such inscriptions and clay tablets, but no-one knows how to read any of them.
The breakthrough shows the mapping between the older Linear A and Linear B, and it turns out to be closer than expected. This means that the the place name trick can be used again - once we recognise a place name in a Linear B script, we can map it to Linear A and find it in the older tablets.
Essentially we can now read Linear A. We just don't know what it means, because the Minoans didn't speak Greek.
- Apple is devoted to inclusivity, privacy, and civil liberties unless there's money involved in which case they will happily climb in bed with a genocidal fascist dictatorship. (New York Times)
And worse, they will do this even when it costs them money.
And still lecture you endlessly on how much more enlightened they are.
- LinkedIn - owned by Microsoft - also appears to be censoring critics of the Chinese regime. (Bloomberg)
Microsoft is generally the least worst of Big Tech, but that's all relative. In absolute terms, they are - most of the time - an uncaring behemoth that will squash you like a bug if you get in the way.
- Android 12 is on its way. (ZDNet)
Generally between versions 4 and 8 of any software, users switch from "can't wait" to "oh fuck, not another one".
With Android, I think it was 7. 6 introduced some critical missing capabilities, though OEMs - including Sony and Samsung - fucked it up anyway.
- Apple announced in court that it didn't take a cut of $400 billion of goods it didn't sell. (The Verge)
People are acting as if Apple made a coherent point.
- Parler is back on the App Store. (Reuters)
At this point the glow can probably be seen from Alpha Centauri.
Haba Haba Zot Zot Video of the Day
Warning: If you're currently watching El Hazard but have only seen the first couple of episodes, the videos below contain hilarious spoilers.
This is a scene-for-scene remake of the redo version of the classic AMV by Nic Neidenbach from 2001, using the recent Blu-Ray release of El Hazard.
This is the redo version, and you can see that whoever was in charge of the Blu-Ray release did an absolutely stellar job.
Disclaimer: Haba haba mori mori.
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Monday, May 17
Daily News Stuff 17 May 2021
Sand On Zanzibar Edition
Anime of the day is Iria: Zeiram the Animation, a six-episode OVA series from 1994. At the time all I knew about this was that it was awesome; it came out about the same time as the world wide web so there was limited information about who or what Zeiram was or why they needed to qualify this as "the animation".
Zeiram was the titular monster of a 1991 Japanese live action sci-fi / horror film - also featuring Iria - and this anime series acts as a prequel. Apparently the live action film (and its sequel) are not particularly well-regarded, but the anime series is a minor classic.
Update: Apparently that clip is blocked in certain less enlightened countries. Here's an alternative.
You might wonder why anyone would watch an anime girl play Minecraft when they could just play the game themselves, and this is why.
Sand On Zanzibar Edition
Top Story
- The secret is to bang the rocks together, guys. (Bloomberg)
Or in this case, buy up the small companies working as sub-contractors in your field, pay everyone more to keep the staff happy, and squeeze out the middlemen who were taking all the profits.Software engineers are underpaid in Japan compared to the U.S. and there’s a shortage of them, according to Saito.
Funny how that correlation escapes so many people. Mind you, the shortage of good engineers is universal.
Zeiram was the titular monster of a 1991 Japanese live action sci-fi / horror film - also featuring Iria - and this anime series acts as a prequel. Apparently the live action film (and its sequel) are not particularly well-regarded, but the anime series is a minor classic.
Update: Apparently that clip is blocked in certain less enlightened countries. Here's an alternative.
Tech News
- URLs too short? Lengthen them with aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.com! (aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.com)
I mean, why not?
- Apple is introducing 3D lossless audio streaming. (9to5Mac)
Completely unable to tell the difference? That's you and everyone else on the planet, except for some of the bats.
- A new aluminium ion battery design from Australia is claimed to charge up to 60 times faster than lithium ion batteries. (Forbes)
Hmm.
And hold three times as much energy.
Yeah, I'm not sure about-
And have no upper current limit or overheating problems.
coughbullshitcough
Dave from EEVblog hasn't weighed in yet, but I expect he will. He loves tearing these sorts of claims apart.
- Huawei has been able to monitor all calls on one of the Netherands' largest mobile networks for ten years. (The Guardian)
And the owners of the network have known about this for... Ten years.
On the other hand, congratulations, Huawei, you infiltrated a country the size of a suburban back yard most noted for its wooden shoes and hilariously overpriced flower seeds.
- A security vulnerability has been found in the Universal Turing Machine. (The Register)
This confused me for a moment because Turing machines do not have a security model; it's like claiming to have found a bug in arithmetic. In this case, it's a bug in a specification by Marvin Minsky for a Turing machine simulator - from 1967, making this one of the longest-standing security bugs ever.
- Nijisanji EN launched while I wasn't looking. I watch Hololive EN pretty regularly - mostly their Minecraft streams, but some other stuff too - so I was looking forward to this, but they announced it on Wednesday and launched on Sunday, so it was easy to miss.
Just three girls in the initial roster, but Nijisanji iterates rapidly. Finana's debut blew up on the launch pad at T+8 seconds when technical difficulties not only shut down her stream but prevented her starting a new one, but Pomu, who seems to be a herbaceous shrub, looks fun. She sang the Hamtaro theme in her debut stream.
- Via the comments on the other site: eBay is banning the sale of all material of, by, from, to, about, or in any other way relating to sex. (The Verge)
This worked out so well for Tumblr that the genii running eBay simply could not wait to replicate that success themselves.
Hololive Clip of the Day
You might wonder why anyone would watch an anime girl play Minecraft when they could just play the game themselves, and this is why.
Disclaimer: You might wonder if all of Hololive is like that, and the answer is no, some of it is a little strange.
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Sunday, May 16
Daily News Stuff 16 May 2021
Essential Means Essential Edition
Anime of the day is Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki, created by AIC - who earlier animated Bubblegum Crisis together with Artmic - and released by Pioneer in 1992.
And somewhere in all of that, the series created the most enduring villain in anime, Misao Amano, better known by the name of her alter ego, Pixy Misa.
Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure is what Evangelion would have been if it had been good, instead of being desperate to convince people it was good. Dual is dumb, but it's fun. It fits somewhere in the Tenchi Muyo universe despite having no direct reference to the earlier series; there are too many indirect references to be anything but an intentional spinoff.
El Hazard: The Magnificent World is probably the best of all of the 90s series produced by AIC and Pioneer. It's not a spinoff or related to Tenchi at all, except for the art style, the production company's fondness for multi-part titles, and a strange fascination with cross-dressing.
Phantom Quest Corp is one of the less well known AIC releases from that era. It only ran to four episodes, but not only did it have a kick-ass opening theme, it had a kick-ass dub of the kick-ass opening theme. In fact, most of these series got English translations of their theme songs, many of them genuinely good.
Unsurprisingly they eventually ran out of money and stopped doing that; though AIC is still around today, it's a licensing company for its older projects and hasn't done any significant work since... Well, PupipÅ! (2013) was remarkably deep for a series of 15 short episodes and I highly recommend it, but I don't know if it counts as significant. What the hell, I'll give them that. Hasn't done any significant work since 2013.
Disclaimer: And no, Ai Tenchi Muyo doesn't count.
Essential Means Essential Edition
Top Story
- Framework's modular laptop is now available for pre-order starting at $999. (ZDNet)
Or $749 for a DIY kit. (Framework)
Yes, a DIY kit for a modern laptop, when these things are quite commonly glued together and unrepairable.
It comes standard with a 13.5" 3:2 display with a resolution of 2256x1504 covering 100% of sRGB colour, an eleventh-gen Intel Core i5 or Core i7 CPU, a headphone jack, and a screwdriver.
You can then select up to 64GB of RAM and 8TB of storage, and it has four tiny expansion modules each of which can be USB-A, USB-C, DisplayPort, HDMI, a microSD slot, or an extra storage module with a capacity of up to 1TB.
The company is opening the spec for these modules to allow third-party options, and looking at the design it could even support multi-gigabit wired Ethernet using one of those clever hinged ports. The modules are too small for a full-size RJ-45 port, but they aren't enclosed at the bottom, so the rear slots probably would give just enough clearance. You could probably fit dual USB-C ports in one module as well.
It doesn't have the Four Essential Keys, and while the keyboard is designed to be easily swapped out there's currently only the one option so that's only useful if you need to fix it. When they correct that, this could become the laptop of choice for a wide variety of tasks.
The series consists of two six-episode OVA series plus four special episodes, plus three later sequel series each delivering six more episodes - the last of them just airing now, three theatrical films, five sequel and/or alternate universe series, and at least seven spin-offs. Also dozens of novels and volumes of manga, video games, a table-top roleplaying game, a radio drama, and a stage play.
So it had something of an impact. In the mid-to-late 90s, AIC's art style was as recognisable as Kyoto Animation's in the mid-to-late 2000s.
So it had something of an impact. In the mid-to-late 90s, AIC's art style was as recognisable as Kyoto Animation's in the mid-to-late 2000s.
And somewhere in all of that, the series created the most enduring villain in anime, Misao Amano, better known by the name of her alter ego, Pixy Misa.
Tech News
- Zen 4 powered Epyc server processors will be shipping in 2022. (WCCFTech)
We kind of knew that; this is just a leaked slide deck confirming additional details. The chips will include up to 96 cores, 12 channels of DDR5 memory, and 29% better IPC (instructions per cycle - performance at a given clock speed), plus they're expected to run at higher clock speeds.
This will all come on a massive new socket with 6096 pins, and deliver 128 lanes of PCIe 5.0 for 512GB/s of I/O bandwidth.
I don't know how big a motherboard you'd need to have a fully-populated dual-socket system - there would be 48 memory modules, and boards with 32 modules barely fit in a standard server rack. (Supermicro)
But since one of these new chips should deliver as much performance as two of the current generation, which are already incredibly fast, there might not be as many customers demanding dual-socket systems.
- We waste 500 years each day on CAPTCHAs. (Cloudflare)
It's time to end this madness, says Cloudflare, and instead use Cloudflare.
With all due respect, Cloudflare, get fucked.
- Things you can't do in Rust. (LogRocket)
Rust is a systems programming language that prevents you from doing bad things. Lots of bad things. Many of them incredibly useful things, like taking the first N characters from a string. Nope, can't do that, because Unicode is a semantic superfund site. Go write your own custom code that is guaranteed to have its own unique bugs.
I appreciate what Rust is trying to do, but it's not a language I can recommend to most independent developers. If you have enough engineering staff that there are entire teams doing nothing but create and maintain libraries for the other programmers to use, then yes, you probably should be using Rust and likely already are.
But for the typical application, no.
- Apple rejected 215,000 apps last year for privacy reasons, and another 150,000 for spam or misleading behaviour. (Bleeping Computer)
How many of them actually committed the sins of which they stand accused is another question entirely, and one that will likely never be answered. Apple's app submission process is infamously Kafkaesque.
- A new spaceport is under construction in Nova Scotia, with the first launch expected next year. (CBC)
Meanwhile, a Rocket Lab* launch from New Zealand lost two satellites after the second stage failed shortly after ignition. (CNet)
I guess the assist you get from an equatorial launch just doesn't matter as much for smaller rockets like these. You wouldn't want to launch a Saturn V from Finland, though.
* Not LogRocket. Different company. Probably.
Tenchi and Beyond Videos of the Day
Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure is what Evangelion would have been if it had been good, instead of being desperate to convince people it was good. Dual is dumb, but it's fun. It fits somewhere in the Tenchi Muyo universe despite having no direct reference to the earlier series; there are too many indirect references to be anything but an intentional spinoff.
El Hazard: The Magnificent World is probably the best of all of the 90s series produced by AIC and Pioneer. It's not a spinoff or related to Tenchi at all, except for the art style, the production company's fondness for multi-part titles, and a strange fascination with cross-dressing.
Phantom Quest Corp is one of the less well known AIC releases from that era. It only ran to four episodes, but not only did it have a kick-ass opening theme, it had a kick-ass dub of the kick-ass opening theme. In fact, most of these series got English translations of their theme songs, many of them genuinely good.
Unsurprisingly they eventually ran out of money and stopped doing that; though AIC is still around today, it's a licensing company for its older projects and hasn't done any significant work since... Well, PupipÅ! (2013) was remarkably deep for a series of 15 short episodes and I highly recommend it, but I don't know if it counts as significant. What the hell, I'll give them that. Hasn't done any significant work since 2013.
Disclaimer: And no, Ai Tenchi Muyo doesn't count.
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Saturday, May 15
Daily News Stuff 15 May 2021
Stop Making Sin Edition
Anime of the day is K-On! Kyoto Animation's classic story of schoolgirls sitting around eating cake. Oh, and they're in a rock band. But mostly cake.
It's a lovely touch that a video discussing a government ban on protests against COVID lockdowns carries a forced message linking to official government COVID propa - cough - information.
There are a lot of these. I could spend all week just posting the good ones. But I won't.
Probably.
Just yesterday Cover Corp got blanket permission to stream Square Enix games, and today Pekora (Hololive's resident Bugs Bunny character) has jumped head first into Final Fantasy X.
It's the first Final Fantasy game I ever played, and looks just like I remember, which tells you what memory is worth because I played it on the PS2 on an S-Video TV and Pekora is streaming the remastered HD version.
Also wasn't Rikku's ship scarlet red? Or was that another one you got later in the game?
Stop Making Sin Edition
Top Story
- TSMC and Samsung are looking to massively expand chip production in the US after Europe has proved itself useless. (Retuers)
Existing European chip makers - and yes, there are some - are protesting the idea of subsidies for leading-edge chipmakers, saying that subsidies should only go to companies producing chips on older nodes. They have a point, though, since those chips are mostly embedded controllers used in vehicles and appliances and a shortage of $1 engine timing controllers can shut down an entire production line of $40,000 cars.
And coincidentally, those are precisely the chips they make.
In any case, TSMC is looking to not only build the announced 5nm plant in Arizona, but up to five additional plants using even more advanced technology - where each could cost $10 billion or more. Two thirds of TSMC's revenue comes from North America, and only 6% from Europe.
Tech News
- AmigaOS 3.2 is out. (Hyperion Entertainment)
For all those of you who still have working Amigas, which I probably don't, for while there are a couple sitting in a closet in the spare bedroom I haven't looked at them in years and it's highly likely they've suffered a battery or capacitor accident in all that time.
Easier to emulate these days - I mean, there are emulators that even encode to NTSC and back again to produce historically realistic colour - though I applaud those who keep classic hardware working.
- Guido van Rossum, creator of Python, is seeking to make the language twice as fast. (ZDNet)
It's called PyPy, it already exists, and it's four times as fast.
- The DarkSide hacking group has outlived its usefulness and been discarded. (Bleeping Computer)
Shockingly, there's no word of anyone actually being arrested.
- It looks like the Radeon 6600 and 6600XT have leaked. (Tom's Hardware)
And the Radeon 6500 as well. (WCCFTech)
The 6600 XT isn't much smaller than the 6700 XT - 2048 shaders vs. 2560 - but it has one third the on-chip RAM, which AMD calls "Infinity Cache". That will mean it's much less capable at higher resolutions; 4K will be out for any even slightly recent game and 1440p dubious. It should make a decent 1080p card, though; it will easily crush the RX 580 that I'm still using.
The 6500 is half of a 6600 XT and will be fine for basic stuff, older games, and modern indie and casual titles. It should also give us an idea of how AMD's upcoming APUs will perform. It's the first low-end RDNA2 part to be released. I mean, it hasn't been released yet, or even announced, but when it is, it will be.
The advantage of reducing the RAM size is that these will be much smaller chips and easy to pump out in volume. They'll also be of little interest to crypto miners; respective quirks of AMD and Nvidia's current generations mean that an Nvidia card with a certain level of gaming performance is much better at mining than an equal ranked AMD card. In the last generation, the opposite was true.
- Even the tame Apple press doesn't want to buy Apple's new products. (Six Colors)
They blame the pandemic, rather than Apple's overpriced toys, but they still don't want to buy Apple's overpriced toys.
- Mammals can breathe through their arseholes. (Gizmodo)
Unsurprising considering how many of them talk out theirs.
- Given that we're living through Heinlein's Crazy Years and Stop Making Sense is not just a concert film but the Eleventh Commandment, it should be no surprise that The Jehovah's Witnesses have filed a copyright suit against Lego stop-motion animations on YouTube. (TorrentFreak)
And yet, somehow, it does.
- What idiot at YouTube decided that Base64 was a good encoding for video IDs?
I For One Welcome Our New Recursively Oppressive Overlords
It's a lovely touch that a video discussing a government ban on protests against COVID lockdowns carries a forced message linking to official government COVID propa - cough - information.
Another K-On! Anime Music Video of the Day
There are a lot of these. I could spend all week just posting the good ones. But I won't.
Probably.
Just As I Misremembered Hololive Video of the Day
Just yesterday Cover Corp got blanket permission to stream Square Enix games, and today Pekora (Hololive's resident Bugs Bunny character) has jumped head first into Final Fantasy X.
It's the first Final Fantasy game I ever played, and looks just like I remember, which tells you what memory is worth because I played it on the PS2 on an S-Video TV and Pekora is streaming the remastered HD version.
Also wasn't Rikku's ship scarlet red? Or was that another one you got later in the game?
Disclaimer: Plus ça change, plus a'lorange.
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Friday, May 14
Daily News Stuff 14 May 2021
A Subsidy In Every Pot Edition
Anime of the day isn't an anime at all: Wakfu is a French cartoon animated in Adobe Flash to market an online game. The thing is, it's about seventeen thousand percent better than you'd expect from that description. This one just came out of nowhere.
Song is Crabbuckit as covered by the Good Lovelies. Anime is Tamako Market, an original series by Kyoto Animation. Like all their work, the art and animation is first-rate; like all their original series, the story itself is sadly second-rate.
This gives an idea of KyoAni's work. Yes, all these shows look the same, but they were actually chosen for that reason. That's their house style, but not all their work is the same. Lucky Star and Dragon Maid are two that strike out on their own.
Disclaimer: Mostly in order to eat bugs though.
A Subsidy In Every Pot Edition
Top Story
- President Biden signed an executive order "boosting the cyber posture of the federal government". (ZDNet)
Not doing anything, just boosting their posture.
- The FBI and CISA published a joint advisory on DarkSide ransomware. (ZDNet)
It's ware and it's ransom, the advisory explains.
- Don't negotiate with terrorists and kidnappers, says UK Home Secretary Priti Patel. (ZDNet)
Paying a ransom in response to ransomware does not guarantee a successful outcome, will not protect networks from future attacks, nor will it prevent the possibility of future data leaks. In fact, paying a ransom is likely to encourage criminality to continue to use this approach. Just shoot the fuckers. Oh dear, is the mic still hot?
I may have embellished that very slightly.
- Colonial Pipeline paid close to $5 million in ransom. (ZDNet)
And received an unlock code that is too slow to be of any use.
- On the other hand hackers posted psych evals of DC police after the department asked for a 97.5% disability discount. (Ars Technica)
This story broke a while ago, but this is the first I've heard of a data leak connected with the hack.
- ZFS snapshots, people.
Tech News
- Inland - that is, Micro Center's - Performance Plus PCIe 4.0 SSDs also don't suck. (AnandTech)
Unlike their PCIe 3.0 models, though, they're not particularly budget friendly; they're priced just barely under competing models from Samsung and Western Digital.
- Samsung has increased its planned semiconductor manufacturing expansion to $150 billion. (WCCFTech)
That's over nine or ten years, though, so while the total is larger it's still around half the rate of TSMC. Though I'm not sure what's included and if the numbers are directly comparable.
Either way, that's a lot.
- Microsoft is killing its Azure blockchain-as-a-service component. (ZDNet)
Private blockchains are much faster and orders of magnitude cheaper than public, fully-distributed blockchains using proof-of-work algorithms - and don't hoover up all the world's video cards - but it's not clear exactly what they are for.
There are valid uses for a publicly readable cryptographically secure ledger, particularly one that can have hard-wired contracts. Just not as many as people first hoped.
- Another day, another US government department illegally spying on its own citizens. (Motherboard)
Today it's the DoD.
The article mentions the Fourth Amendment is Not For Sale Act, which would require by law that government departments do that which they are already required by law to do, i.e. come back with a warrant.
- How many CPU cores do you need for great PC gaming? (Hot Hardware)
6.
- Samsung has shown off a CXL memory expander. (Serve the Home)
A which what?
CXL is a new interface based on PCIe 5.0 - which is expected to show up this year - that will allow you to attach memory to the I/O bus as easily as video cards or SSDs. A PCIe 5.0 x16 slot actually has about the same unidirectional bandwidth as a DDR5-8400 slot, and PCIe is bidirectional.
This will allow servers to have memory bays the way they currently have drive bays, possibly even with the ability to swap modules live if the operating system can swap out the necessary pages.
- Microsoft's Surface Duo, a great $400 business communications device that had the misfortune to be priced at $1400, is now $700. (Ars Technica)
That's a lot more reasonable but certainly not cheap.
Bucket of Crabs Anime Music Video of the Day
Song is Crabbuckit as covered by the Good Lovelies. Anime is Tamako Market, an original series by Kyoto Animation. Like all their work, the art and animation is first-rate; like all their original series, the story itself is sadly second-rate.
This gives an idea of KyoAni's work. Yes, all these shows look the same, but they were actually chosen for that reason. That's their house style, but not all their work is the same. Lucky Star and Dragon Maid are two that strike out on their own.
Disclaimer: Mostly in order to eat bugs though.
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