• Need bitmapped fonts in odd sizes, such as 10x10?  Dwarf Fortress.  (Dwarf Fortress Wiki)
  
  It's not clear what the licensing situation is on these, though some are based on open-source fonts or are otherwise explicitly open source.
  
  I could also use a 20x20 font for standard-resolution text mode, given that I am using an HP-style analogue antialiasing trick.
  
  
  
• HP has a new Spectre x360 range out including that dumb configuration we saw before.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 14 looks nice, with a Tiger Lake CPU, 13.5" 3000x2000 display, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, 32GB of Optane for some reason, 
  
  The 13 has a 4k OLED touchscreen, and only 8GB of RAM.  Why?  Who is this for?
  
  Apart from some dumb configuration decisions, the systems all have the Four Essential Keys in the One True Arrangement.
  
  
  
• Talking with Chris Sawyer about Transport Tycoon.  (Life and Times of Games)
  
  With a brief digression on the subject of the Memotech MTX 500, which could have been the inspiration for the Imagine if I hadn't already been inspired by the Fujitsu FM-7.
  
  The MTX 500 / 512 is a little-known but remarkably capable British home computer from the early 80s.  It came out in 1983 and though it shipped with a fairly normal 64k of RAM (and 24k of ROM) it was expandable to 768k.
  
  
  
  
  
• A leaked benchmark of the Ryzen 5900X put it at 25% faster than the current 3900X unless it's all fake.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's a single-threaded score and would be a combination of IPC and clock speed gains, and it's on the high end of plausibility.
  
  The multi-threaded score showed only a 15% gain, which is curious.  Not impossible, but curious.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, October 03 2020 02:37 PM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, October 03 2020 10:37 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Humble's latest Bundles include a Corel Draw collection that doesn't have Corel Draw in it and a Drizzt adventures collection (R. A. Salvatore's series of D&D novels) that starts from book 7.
  
  This is some really low-effort stuff, HB.  Do better.
  
  
  
• Microsoft's Surface Go Laptop is a reasonable 3:2 12" laptop starting at $699.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's not going to set the world on fire, but it does have a 4-core / 8-thread 15W Intel 10th-gen CPU, and not one but two USB ports.  Screen is 1536x1024, which rates it as not terrible, with 8GB of RAM and just 128GB of storage at that price point.  Neither of which are upgradeable; it doesn't even have a microSD slot.
  
  The screen is touch, and the Four Essential Keys are sort of present - they do double duty as F9-F12, but there's no room for them anywhere else so I'll give them a pass on that one.
  
  With a microSD slot I could see this having some slight potential.  Without, no.  Forget it.
  
  
  
• Microsoft also updated the Surface Pro X.  (AnandTech)
  
  The new version uses Microsoft's SQ2 processor in place of the older SQ1, and costs $500 more than the original version, though the configurations may not be equivalent.  I hope there are other differences, because...
  
  The SQ2 is Microsoft's branding of Qualcomm's 8CX Gen 2, which as I reported earlier is exactly the same fucking chip as the 8CX Gen 1.  Exactly nowhere does Qualcomm mention this or provide any performance comparison between the two, so it takes some digging to realise that this is a purely marketing upgrade.
  
  
  
• The XMG DJ 15 is an unremarkable second-tier thin-and-light 15" notebook except for twelve things.  (AnandTech)
  
  Those being the ports.  It has two USB 3.0 Type A and one USB 2.0, one Thunderbolt 3 with 60W fast charging (I'm not sure if the laptop can charge over that or if it's just for charging other devices), a full-size SD card slot, separate 3.5mm headphone and microphone jacks, full-size HDMI and mini DisplayPort, and a wired gigabit Ethernet port (one of those neat ones that pops open when plug in the cable, then closes up again when you unplug).
  
  Dongles need not apply.
  
  Memory is two DIMM slots and storage is M.2 NVMe, so both are upgradeable.  It's the anti-MacBook.
  
  With a Core i7, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD, and a 1080p display, it's €1,337.
  
  
  
• 3270font is a 3270 font.  (GitHub)
  
  Seems pretty complete too.  It has the usual ASCII and EBCDIC, bold, italic, bold italic, underline, overline, weird European frilly letters, single and double line box drawing, APL, Greek and Cyrillic, and...  Ogham.
  
  I might be able to use this.  Just add PETSCII and I'm there.  Have to see how it renders down to a 10x10 grid but I have a cheat if it doesn't look great (thanks to the HP 150).
  
  
  
• Speaking of classic IBM kit.  (Reddit)
  
  
  
  This is an actual working system.  The system and monitor cases are 3D-printed, the screen is a 3.5" LCD, and the hardware is a Raspberry Pi 4.
  
  
  
• Had to go to the shops again today, the first time in a while I've done that during daytime on a weekday.  Everything was normal, except that it's spring here now and there were still about the number of people wearing masks that you'd see during flu season.
  
  Darrell Lea peanut brittle chocolate seems to have disappeared, which is very annoying because it was gluten-free and even better than Cadbury Roast Almond.
  
  And I noticed a girl in the supermarket with Uzaki-chan grey-brown hair.  I'm assuming it was tinted because I've never seen quite that colour before.
  
  
  
  

Manga Notes

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Never update your operating system, Mac edition.  (Mr Macintosh)
  
  Thanks to Brickmuppet and J Greely for finding this one.  It's conspicuously absent from the two Apple-focused blogs I follow.
  
  
  
• Never update your operating system, ChromeOS edition.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I guess Google didn't want to feel left out.  Pretty much the same situation: Run the normal update, and your CPU is left running at 100% forever.
  
  
  
• There's someone who's even worse at extending SQL than the Postgres people.  (Vespa.ai)
  
  Vespa is an AI-oriented search engine with a SQL-like query language, so that you can say:

  select * from music where title contains "madonna";

  And it will do exactly what you expect.
  
  Unfortunately it's all downhill from there.  If you want to match a phrase, you can't just provide a phrase, you need to use the phrase function:

  where text contains phrase("st", "louis", "blues");

  Okay, that's a minor hassle but not overly egregious.  What about stemming?  Is there a simple keyword to control stemming in matches?  Well, there's this:

  where text contains ([{"stem": false}]"blues");

  Why is it JSON?  Why is it a list?  Why does a nearest neighbour query turn into this:

  where [{"targetHits": 10}] nearestNeighbor(doc_vector, query_vector);&ranking.features.query(query_vector)=[3,5,7]

  I'm annoyed enough with Elasticsearch that I'm tempted to try it anyway.
  
  
  

   

• Neo4j supports Lucene queries, doesn't it?  Yes, it does.  Now why...  Oh, right.
  
  I looked at using Neo4j at my day job before, but it didn't support multiple databases, which would have made it a massive pain to deploy.  Now we have our own little cloud platform of Threadripper servers, and I can spin up a new node in about three seconds.  Might be worth taking another look.
  
  
  
• Gigabyte has a new range of Brix Pro mini-PCs with Tiger Lake CPUs.  (AnandTech)
  
  On the one hand, they max out at four cores.  On the other hand, they support 64GB of RAM, two M.2 NVMe drives, six USB Type A 10Gbit ports, four HDMI ports, 2.5Gbit and 1Gbit Ethernet, and one Thunderbolt 4 port.
  
  
  
• This house.
  
  
  
  
  Keep clicking through the photos until you get to the good bit.  You'll know it when you see it.  No, not the pipe organ in the pirate-themed dining hall.  No, not the very fully-stocked bar.  No, not the lookout over the swimming pool, or the observatory, or the bunker below the observatory.
  
  If you hit the pirate cave wine cellar you've gone too far and need to back up.

Posted by: Phil Fraering at Thursday, October 01 2020 12:11 AM (Clxcy)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, October 01 2020 02:02 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 02 2020 12:22 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 02 2020 12:25 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Friday, October 02 2020 03:34 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 02 2020 03:47 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Friday, October 02 2020 08:16 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, October 03 2020 01:05 PM (vNkOW)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Arm has announced new cores to power the Robot Uprising.  (AnandTech)
  
  The Cortex 78AE CPU and Mali 78AE GPU are - no surprise - embedded variants of the Cortex 78 and Mali 78.
  
  One notable update is GPU virtualisation: In a hard real-time system you can subdivide the GPU and allocate cores to specific tasks (which may or may not actually involve graphics).
  
  
  
• Lenovo announced a new Thinkpad X1 model, the X1 Nano.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Slightly smaller and lighter (1.99 lbs) than the existing X1 Carbon, it has a 2160x1350 (16:10) display, an Intel Tiger Lake CPU of some kind, and up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD, which is what my HP Spectre X2 has and it came out in 2017.
  
  It has two Thunderbolt 4 ports, a headphone jack, and nothing else.  Starting at $1399.
  
  
  
• Lenovo also announced the Thinkpad X1 Fold, a folding laptop costing $2499.  (AnandTech)
  
  Wait, you say.
  
  Yes, I say, I know.
  
  That aside, its 13" 2048x1536 OLED screen folds neatly in half, so that when you unfold it and attach it to its keyboard it's actually larger than a regular laptop.
  
  But without the keyboard it's a very nice 4:3 tablet that weighs 50% more than an iPad Pro, which has a higher resolution screen and costs half as much.
  
  
  
• When searching with DuckDuckGo, if you get unsatisfactory results you can add !g to the end of your query to do a Google search.
  
  There are other such codes.  (GitHub)
  
  Just a few of them.
  
  
  
• I wondered how you might build a system like the Imagine these days.  With its random access to VRAM you'd likely want static RAM, so I looked up what's available on Mouser.
  
  32MB with an access time of...  Oh.  With an access time of 450 picoseconds.  That would do it.

Barlowe's Guide to Catgirls Video of the Day

• Another day, another alleged leak of the RX 6000 range.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Even sites that are paid by the click are evincing skepticism of the details, which means it will probably turn out to be true.
  
  
  
• The simulation is starting to break down.
  
  
  
  
  
• The RTX 3060 will have more cores than the 2080 Ti.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which doesn't mean a whole lot, because half the cores on the 3000 series are, well, half-cores.  If drivers can be optimised to better utilise this architecture, Nvidia will have a winner.  But you would think they'd have thought of that.
  
  
  
• Have you tried turning your simulation off and then on again?
  
  
  
  
  
• Researchers have found the documentation for a secret Nazi supercomputer that has lain dormant for 75 years.  (Vice)
  
  Of course they're planning to turn it on.  What's the worst that could happen?
  
  
  
• There is nothing wrong with your simulation.  Do not attempt to adjust the settings.
  
  
  
  
  
• SectorForth contains only 10 primitives.  (GitHub)
  
  It is nonetheless a complete working Forth compiler that can be bootstrapped up to arbitrary complexity.
  
  That fits in a boot sector.
  
  
  
• Trust the simulation.  The simulation is your friend.
  
  
  
  
  
• The original source code for Elite on the BBC Micro has been recovered and published.  (BBCElite)
  
  And more importantly, documented, because they were so short of space the code didn't have any line breaks, never mind comments.
  
  
  
• Simulation is the sincerest form of flattery.
  
  
  
  
  
• Thailand is suing Facebook and Twitter for lese majeste.  (Reuters)
  
  In Thailand it is a felony to insult or disparage the king, who is a fat and rather unattractive turtle.  Thailand seems to be threatening to arrest Facebook.
  
  
  

I'll See You In Hell, Pachelbel Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Monday, September 28 2020 11:17 PM (LADmw)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• More leaks of Radeon 6000 specs from recent driver updates.  (WCCFTech)
  
  In raw numbers, Navy Flounder - the 6700 XT - looks to be 30% faster than the current 5700 XT, and Sienna Cichlid - the 6900 XT or whatever they choose to call it - to be 130% faster.  Dimgrey Cavefish will be the new low-end card and will probably run somewhat faster than the current RX 5700 (non-XT).
  
  These numbers put the 6900 XT at about 75% of the raw TFLOPs of the RTX 3080, but the RTX 3000 series increased TFLOPs more than it did game performance, so AMD looks to be in the 3080 ballpark.
  
  It could all be nonsense, but the numbers are plausible.  We already have full specs for the RDNA2 chips in the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, and these line up pretty well with those designs.
  
  
  
• PyPy 7.3.2 now supports Python 3.7.  (MorePyPy)
  
  The 3.7 version is marked alpha, though it's considered stable outside of specific new Python 3.7 features.
  
  
  
• The return of Fiber Channel: Kioxia (Toshiba) is sampling SSDs that plug directly into 25Gb Ethernet.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Each drive has dual Ethernet ports for redundancy.
  
  Fiber Channel itself is still around and according to Wikipedia can now hit speeds of 256Gbps, which is quite a lot.
  
  
  
• San Francisco's Metropolitan Transport Commission is thinking of requiring tech workers to work from home.  (NBC News)
  
  "Preferably from a different state entirely," they added.  "California is fucked."
  

Posted by: normal at Monday, September 28 2020 01:22 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, September 28 2020 03:08 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, September 28 2020 07:53 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Monday, September 28 2020 11:05 PM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 29 2020 12:01 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, September 29 2020 02:34 AM (ZlYZd)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Seagate Unveils CORTX Object Storage Software with Lyve Drive Rack Hardware Reference Design.  (AnandTech)
  
  I saw this yesterday and my brain glazed over.  Unfortunately that headline misses out certain key details, such as "open source", "GitHub", and "available now completely free for everybody".
  
  
  
• Something is rotten in the state of RTX 3000 Land.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Several things, actually.  Apart from the fact that (a) the cards sold out immediately, (b) many of them went to scalpers running bots, and (c) some cards shipped in OEM packaging, which is to say, no packaging at all, we now find that (d) some models of third-party cards are randomly crashing.
  
  This appears to be due to the selection of - as Louis Rossman would say - cappa-sitters for power filtering.
  
  Here's all the details, as a reviewer tears apart about 2% of the worlds total stock of RTX 3000 cards to demonstrate the cappa-sitter issue.
  
  
  
  They are still hands down the fastest video cards you can buy...  That exist right now.  We'll see in a month how AMD responds.
  
  
  
• Ruby 3.0 preview 1 is out.  (Ruby-lang)
  
  It has everything we expect from a new version of Ruby, such as an alternative assignment operator that works from left to right.  Because why not?
  
  
  
• Will Dimgrey Cavefish please come to the white courtesy phone?  (Phoronix)
  
  The latest Linux kernel patches from AMD appear to confirm previous leaks about the upcoming Van Gogh low-power APUs (Zen 2, RDNA 2, DDR5) and identify a new GPU codenamed Dimgrey Cavefish, which slots in alongside Sienna Cichlid and Navy Flounder in AMD's exciting new game of Graphics Card or NPR Journalist.
  
  
  
• Clippy has completed...  His?  Its?  Their corporate takeover of Twitter.  (The Verge)
  
  I see you are planning to use Twitter.  Do you really want to do that?
  
  
  
• Google Maps is removing photos of Ayer's Rock.  (CNN)
  
  This is why we can't have nice things.
  
  
  
• Been trying to think how our imaginary engineers could have used the cartridge port to upgrade the Imagine's graphics capabilities, the way some NES and SNES cartridges did.  Turns out you kind of can't, not without sticking a video port on the cartridge itself.
  
  The key design feature of the video controller is that it has two separate memory buses, so it's already twice as fast as the cartridge port; you can't push pixels through it fast enough to make a difference.  You have to put the new video controller and its memory and the video output circuitry all into a cartridge and then plug your monitor into that.
  
  So if you got a shiny limited-edition Imagine 1100A for Christmas in Earth 2's 1986, and then nine months later the Imagine 1200 showed up with twice the graphics performance, well, you were kind of stuck with it.

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, September 27 2020 01:54 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, September 27 2020 09:35 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• A decoder ring for Intel's 10nm process.  (AnandTech)
  
  Confused?  You're not alone.  Intel has changed the naming scheme for 10nm every time they've updated the process, and now pretends that the initial version of 10nm never existed.
  
  
  
• Google wants to copy all of Apple's worst policies.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Apple is embroiled in a growing war over their mandatory 30% App Store cut?  Perfect time for us to enforce our own 30% cut!
  
  Morons.
  
  
  
• A look at ASRock's new entry-level Epyc server.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It only supports 64 cores, 1TB of RAM, and eleven PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives, so if you're looking for high performance or scalability....  Yeah, that's pretty good for 1U.  Dual 10GBaseT built in, plus a standard network upgrade thingy that they tested with a dual 25Gb module, plus one full-size PCIe 4.0 x16 slot.
  
  The ten 2.5" bays accept either NVMe or SATA drives, which is a nice touch.
  
  
  

• A great price on a dumb configuration.  (Best Buy via Tom's Hardware)
  
  An HP Spectre X360 with a 13.5" 4k AMOLED screen for just $899.  The Four Essential Keys are present and correct.  But only 8GB RAM, and not upgradeable.
  
  I guess there's a reason it's cheap.
  
  
  
• The RTX 3090 is here.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  10% faster than the 3080 for twice the price.  Not that the price is a major issue since you can't buy it anywhere anyway.
  
  
  
• Amazon's new fall lineup of telescreens is here.  (ZDNet)
  
  Including one that flies around your house.
  
  
  
• An extra 1TB of SSD for the $299 Xbox Series S costs $220.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Or you could just buy another Series S.
  
  
  
• Important announcement!
  
  
  
  
  Apparently also Irresponsible Captain Tylor.
  
  
  

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, September 25 2020 08:43 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, September 25 2020 09:40 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Ugh.  One of those days.  My biggest achievement was managing to sign in to Patreon, and I really didn't do anything to fix that.  Also Patreon still sucks, but unfortunately good people use it.
  
  
  
• The Samsung 980 Pro is TLC but still good.  (AnandTech)
  
  Samsung's PM1725 server drive is included in the benchmarks here.  That's what's on the new server, and it doesn't compare well against the newer consumer drives.  On the other hand, for the one benchmark that I can compare directly - sequential reads on an unfragmented drive - I'm seeing 50% better performance than they do here.
  
  The PM1725 is optimised for long life, though; it supports 10x the total number of updates of the 980 Pro.
  
  
  
• Intel has some new 10nm Atoms for embedded use.  (AnandTech)
  
  The 10nm 4-core CPU die plus its 14nm I/O die total 120mm2.  AMD's 8-core Ryzen APU is 150mm2, uses only slightly more power, and is at least four times as fast.
  
  
  
• Speaking of AMD they are preparing a Zen 3 APU with Navi 2 graphics on TSMC's 6nm process unless they aren't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Such a chip won't show up until at least late 2021.  We haven't seen 7nm Zen 3 yet. 
  
  It will support DDR5 RAM and PCIe 4.0.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has acquired exclusive rights to the GPT-3 language model.  (Science Times)
  
  The code is open source, but the trained data model that produced fake Atlantic think-pieces and whatnot is proprietary.  It will be available on Azure.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Thursday, September 24 2020 02:03 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, September 24 2020 02:49 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, September 24 2020 03:05 AM (LADmw)

Hide Comments | Add Comment