• The mainstream media have still not learned the lessons of Gamergate.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  What lessons are those, Tech Crunch?  That you should try to tell the truth on occasion, even if just for the novelty value of it you worthless hacks?
  
  
• Nvidia thinks buying a non-raytracing GPU is crazy.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Doubly crazy now that there are two games that support it.
  
  
• California, the hub of the internet, is up to its eyebrows in human shit.  (WSJ)
  
  And we're told that sympathetic magic is superstitious nonsense.
  
  
• Intel and the art of painting a target on yourself.  (Serve the Home)
  
  The 28 core workstation-oriented W-3275 costs more than a 64-core Epyc.  They're begging for Threadripper 3000 to come along and put them out of their misery.

Pulled Spat Knocked by Michael McClung

If you're looking for tightly-plotted fantasy noir, you can't go wrong with these, particularly with three volumes at the low price of whatever the hell the price is because Amazon won't tell me.  This collection includes

• The Thief Who Pulled on Trouble's Braids
• The Thief Who Spat in Luck's Good Eye
• The Thief Who Knocked on Sorrow's Gate

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, August 19 2019 09:56 AM (GYEIO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, August 19 2019 01:45 PM (PiXy!)

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• DRAM prices are down, flash prices steady.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Good news for everyone except DRAM and flash manufacturers.  As long as prices don't fall far and fast enough to harm those manufacturers and cause factory closures, as happened back in 2013.  Memory prices are only now approaching the lows set back then.
  
  
• Google plans to deprecate FTP support in Chrome.  (PixelsTech)
  
  They're planning to remove FTP support because it's insecure.
  
  It's insecure because they don't support FTPS.
  
  They don't support FTPS because fuck you that's why.
  
  
• If it's hot enough to boil water, it's too hot.
  
  
  
  
• Why is the result of ('b'+'a'+ + 'a'+'a').toLowerCase() 'banana'?  (StackOverflow)
  
  See Google's response to FTPS.
  
  (The toLowerCase() call hides the clue that would let most programmers spot the cause, apart from the obvious problem that it's fucking JavaScript and could do anything at any moment.)
  
  
• Ew.  Ugh.  Seriously, Mozilla?  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Coupled with a remote access vulnerability that could have been seriously nasty.
  
  
• Google wants to reduce the maximum lifespan for SSL certificates to one year.  (ZDNet)
  
  Because, basically, fuck you that's why.
  
  Certificate revocation is a major problem that has no good solution, so Google's plan is to make all certificates revoke themselves every year anyway.
  
  
• Notepad is moving to the Microsoft Store.  (Thurrott,com)
  
  Because...  That allows Microsoft to separate minor application updates out from Windows updates, which actually makes a lot of sense.
  
  
• Imgur got banned from running Google AdSense because .  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 18 2019 06:55 AM (GYEIO)

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• A reminder that Nintendo are also awful and incompetent. (TechDirt)
  
  They just choose different things to be awful and incompetent about.
  
  
• YouTube meanwhile did something right and shut down manual copyright claims that were widely being used to steal revenue. (Tech Crunch)
  
  The scheme was this:
  
  
• Popular channel adds new video.
  
• Scan it for anything resembling any music you might have the license for.
• Whack it with a copyright claim and steal the revenue.
• Copyright claim gets overturned after a few days or a week.
• You still have the revenue you stole.
• Rinse and repeat.

YouTube was deeply shocked that people abused this system that was basically designed to be abused.


• Amazon isn't just for fake 1TB SD cards anymore.  (Serve the Home)
  
  
• Honestly, the main thing that derailed 5G wireless was 5G wireless.  (ZDNet)

• Humble Bundle has Acid Pro 8.0 (music editing) and Sound Forge Pro 12 (audio editing) for $25.
  
  As usual these are last year's versions (though Acid Pro 9.0 only came out in May) but they are the full professional releases for about 5% of the full professional price.
  
  
• Huaweis behaving badly.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Telecommunications company controlled by a totalitarian fascist state meets African kleptocracy.  What could possibly go wrong?
  
  
• WeWork IPO shows it's the most magical unicorn.  (Bloomberg)
  
  WeWork is losing billions and plans to go public soon.  (WCCFTech)
  
  How bad do you have to be at your job for WCCFTech to be so obviously better?
  
  
• A cure has been found for a deadly, multi-drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis.  (New York Times)
  
  And it's relatively cheap and safe.
  
  TB doesn't get the attention of Ebola but this strain killed 75% of its victims before they could even get a diagnosis.
  
  
• Anime4K is a new anime upscaling algorithm.  (GitHub)
  
  It looks to my eye to be slightly better than Waifu2x while being dramatically faster.
  
  
• A dump of internal Google docs revealed a list of blocked news sites.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  Including some site called "oneangrygamer.net".
  
  
• Oh, and 40 pages of YouTube search terms where the algorithm was carefully tweaked to keep you safe from harmful facts.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  
• Just get a mid-range Android phone.  (ZDNet)
  
  Or a low-end one from a reputable brand.  Apple and the Android high end have been captured entirely by fashion trends at this point.
  
  
• Star Wars Barbie actually looks pretty cool  (Amazon)
  
  At $100 I'd hope so.
  
  There's also a Darth Vader Barbie who looks like a 90s New York advertising exec, and...  An R2-D2 Barbie. 
  
  Okay.  You do you, Mattel.  You've sold literally a billion of these things so I won't presume to tell you your business
  
  

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, August 16 2019 01:26 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, August 16 2019 05:25 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, August 16 2019 11:19 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: benzeen at Friday, August 16 2019 03:32 PM (5uTz6)

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• Google is run by idiots.  (Wired)
  
  And staffed by lunatics.
  
  The Wired article repeatedly tries to suggest that some of the problems faced by Google over the past four years stem from outside causes, but the content makes it clear that it is all of their own doing.  One name in particular appears twenty-five times and in any competently run company would appear once followed by a note that that individual's contract was terminated for cause.
  
  The silver lining is that many of the worst of the lunatics resigned in protest over their idiotic tantrums being given due consideration i.e. ignored.  But the CEO of YouTube is one of the chief offenders, and she's still firmly in place and destroying shareholder value at a truly impressive rate.
  
  
• A 3000-series Threadripper might have leaked out via Geekbench.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a 32-core CPU with a base clock of 3.6GHz and 128MB of L3 cache, and there's only one company in the world producing chips like that.  The multi-core score is 15% faster than a 2990WX which is exactly where you'd expect it to be.
  
  
• TechDirt is talking nonsense today.
  
  
• Twitter says fuck you and your fucking edit button you fucking fucks.  (Paraphrased.)  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Meanwhile, Twitter announced a new feature that would sing users' timelines to them in three, four, or five-part harmony.
  
  
• Why Medium sucks for programming articles.  (Medium)
  
  
• Netflix is fucked.  (The Hollywood Reporter)
  
  That's what "inflection point" means, right?
  
  
• Ethereum lagged in dapp users in Q2 but its price doubled.  (The Next Web)

  Despite price increase, it wasn't all plain sailing for Ethereum in Q2.

  No, you idiots, the problems were caused by the price increase.  If the price of Ethereum doubles, the cost of running a distributed app on the Ethereum blockchain also doubles.  How the hell is anyone supposed to absorb that?
  
  
• Inside the world of "terrible" 3 cent microcontrollers.
  
  Which are actually pretty good.

Retrocomputing Journal

• Hynix announced 3.6 GHz HBM2 memory bringing bandwidth for high-end graphics cards close to 2TB per second.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's still a bit too expensive for mid-range cards.  AMD's Vega cards used it and had trouble competing on price as a result.
  
  
• There's a rumour that Intel won't not ship PCIe 4.0 after all and will instead not skip straight to PCIe 5.0.  (PC Perspective)
  
  The idea that Intel would skip an entire PCIe generation was always silly.  PCIe 4.0 doubles your available bandwidth at a stroke, and is supported by devices such as SSDs and video cards right now.  PCIe 5.0 is more complicated, more expensive, uses significantly more power, and not currently available anywhere.
  
  Intel might not qualify servers on PCIe 4.0 if they are aggressively pursuing 5.0 there, because their whole server platform is two years behind schedule anywhere.  But on the desktop?  They will absolutely go to 4.0.
  
  
• Britain is, for some unfathomable reason (actually, it's completely fathomable, it's because they're idiots) working on implementing a godawful EU content-filtering directive just minutes before the country is due to leave the EU forever.  (TechDirt)
  
  TechDirt posted complete nonsense elsewhere to balance out this article.
  
  
• An Indian bullshit sorry online counselling company filed criminal charges against a journalist who contacted them about security holes in their software.  (TechDirt)
  
  As you would.
  
  
• WordPress bought Tumblr in a deal that values Tumblr's porn stash at over $1.097 billion.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
• Ebola is now much more effectively treatable.  (Wired)
  
  Wired says curable, but while the new treatment doubles survival rates, mortaility rates remain terrifying at 49%.
  
  
• Seven plus or minus two.
  
  That's the number of discrete identifiers humans can hold in short term memory.  Long term memory is far, far larger than that - take for example the number of distinct words used in this post so far that you had no trouble at all absorbing.
  
  But if a person is faced with an explanation of something with more than five unfamiliar terms, there's a good chance it will simply make no sense to them.  They're not stupid, or no more stupid than anyone else.  Rather, it's a bad explanation if your target audience is homo sapiens.
  
  
• Windows is falling apart, you should buy Chromebooks instead says completely trustworthy and unbiased company behind Chrome.  (ZDNet)
  
  
• EV certificates are dead following a crippling shortage of green pixels.  (ZDNet)

I wonder if I can find an excuse to put eleven microcontrollers on a single board.

Posted by: Jay at Wednesday, August 14 2019 01:27 AM (mrlXS)

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• The mClassic "plug and play graphics processor" is an is an HDMI-to-HDMI adaptor that probably includes an upscaler / colour-correction chip.  (Tom's Hardware / Indiegogo)
  
  Which your TV already has.  If you have an older console with HDMI feeding into an older monitor with 2560x1440 native resolution and a linear upscaler, this might be what you need to improve the picture quality.  Otherwise it's likely useless.
  
  
• Intel's Phantom Canyon NUC will have 10nm CPUs when it arrives in 2021 unless it doesn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  
• Multi-threading is still hopelessly broken: A Python retrospective.  (ZDNet)
  
  
• Lenovo's new 1U Epyc server offers room for 16 hot swap 2.5" U.2 SSDs.  (Serve the Home)
  
  10 at the front, 2 at the rear, and four...  At the sides?  Or something.  So hot swap once you've dismantled the rack.
  
  Also worth noting that Lenovo are concentrating on single-socket models, not the usual dual-socket.  Exactly how much of the market needs more than 64 cores remains to be seen; I expect a lot of dual-socket servers are sold with two 12-core Xeon Silver CPUs (or their earlier counterparts) and could easily be replaced by even a low-end Epyc now.
  
  
• Samsung just announced a 108-megapixel camera module for smartphones.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  It's a lot bigger than most current camera.  It would have to be, because current camera pixel sizes are close to the wavelength of visible light.  Make them much smaller and they won't actually work.
  
  
• Custom Radeon 5700 cards are arriving.  Do they solve the issues with the reference design?  Are they worth the extra $10?
  
  
  
  Yeah, pretty much.  It's not a lot faster, but it is quieter and cooler and doesn't really cost any more.

Okay, very nice, but what does it actually do...  Oh.  Be right back re-doing the bathroom to be fractally annoying.

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, August 13 2019 12:34 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, August 13 2019 02:00 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, August 14 2019 12:51 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, August 15 2019 10:38 AM (LGSd2)

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• Cisco to Cisco customers: You don't own nothin'.  (iFixit)
  
  Cisco software licenses are now bound to the original purchaser, not to the hardware.  And devices will phone home to check that their current owner has the appropriate license.
  
  This takes second-hand Cisco gear from being a highly-desirable commodity for people building home networks to basically rack-mount rust.
  
  
• One Law for Big and Small Alike, which prohibits you from saying naughty words if you have fewer than a million followers.  (Ars Technica)
  
  YouTube moderators, who couldn't tell which side of their bread was buttered with a gas chromatograph and an easy-print copy of the Chemical Rubber Company's Buttered Bread Handbook, were shocked and appalled that a hugely popular channel wasn't immediately and permanently banned for tasering a dead rat.
  
  Also, it appears that tasering a dead rat is against YouTube's community guidelines, so there goes my new channel before it even got started.
  
  
• Apple is now the fourth largest smartphone maker by volume.  (Yahoo News)
  
  Samsung, Huawei, Oppo, then Apple.
  
  Profits are a different story; while Apple has been weakening on that front as well they are still the industry profit leader by a significant margin.
  
  
• P++ is a strongly-typed offshoot of PHP for people who can't grasp the concept of DON'T USE PHP YOU IDIOTS.  (PHP.net)
  
  
• SQLite can be used as an attack vector  (squints) if you have permission to overwrite another app's database files.  (ZDNet)
  
  So if you already have the key, you can open the door.  It's a sneaky vector to make a security hole persistent, but not a security hole in itself.

I'm increasingly thinking that the solution for the limitations of the 100-pin version of the H750 is just to use two of them.  Everything else is more expensive or more complicated, and often both.

This means I can allocate 512K to user code on one chip, and 512K to graphics on the other.  And that means I can generate the native resolution of 960x540 in 256 colours with neither hardware nor software hacks.  The other (smaller) memory banks can be assigned to audio, sprites, fonts, and the operating system (which doesn't require much space at all).

The link between the two chips will be 50Mbps SPI, which is dreadfully slow by the standards of modern internal buses, but for comparison is more than enough to stream 4K video.  Not that this hardware can get anywhere near 4K video.

In qty 25, it's now about A$30 for parts and A$20 for PCB printing, assembly, and shipping.*  (Not counting shipping parts to China for the assembly.)  For comparison, the case I like is A$70, and the custom keyboard I want is A$230, though those are qty 1.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, August 12 2019 03:22 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Monday, August 12 2019 02:44 PM (ssz1E)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, August 12 2019 11:48 PM (PiXy!)

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• The feud between Japan and South Korea has settled down a bit with Japan approving shipments of chemicals for chip fabrication.  (AnandTech)
  
  I know why there are lingering tensions, but there's almost no-one left alive from when that stuff happened, so maybe cool it, guys?
  
  
• Samsung has announced its own PCIe 4.0 SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This one goes up to 8GB per second - but that's the version that uses a x8 PCIe slot, not M.2.
  
  
• Arm and Global Foundries are partnering on a new 3D chip design.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That is, not a chip that renders 3D graphics, but a chip that is itself built in three dimensions.  Global Foundries process allows a million interconnects between layers per square millimetre.  That's rather a lot.  On a circuit board you might get one.
  
  
• 2019 sucks for smartphones.  (ZDNet)
  
  Apple is a fashion company, not a tech company.  Samsung wants to be a fashion company.  And Huawei has found there's a downside to being a subsidiary of the Chinese military.
  
  Xiaomi and Oppo and other smaller players haven't been doing so badly though.
  
  

I've started work on the circuit design for the A750, and the first step in that is nailing down the pinout for the H750 at its core.

Unlike traditional CPUs like the Z80, where each pin had a well-defined function, each pin on a modern microcontroller like the H750 can be configured to perform multiple different tasks: Act as a timer trigger, send I2C serial data, feed an analog-to-digital converter, or be a simple output pin switched on or off by software.

In the H750, each pin can have up to 16 pre-defined functions, only one of which can be active at any given time.  While they're configured by software, they also have to be reflected in your circuit design.  If you change an ADC input into a QSPI clock while the analog signal is still coming in, it's not going to work terribly well.

The reason this matters is that you can't route any signal to any pin the way you can with an FPGA.  You have some choice, but it's not completely free.  And as it turns out, the function-to-pin mappings in the TQFP-100 version of the STM32H750 are a doubly-indirect dog's breakfast.

I mentioned the idea of using the camera input as a screen capture device.  That's impossible on this version of the chip: The camera input uses the same pins as the LCD output.

Worse, Ethernet and QSPI, both functions I need, steal critical pins from the LCD controller.  You weren't using the third bit of the R part of RGB, were you?  Oh, oops.

It's possible to work around this in indexed colour modes - that is, display modes where (for example) you have a palette of 256 colours from 32,768 - because in that mode the byte you store doesn't mean anything in itself, and as long as I have 15 pins left from the 24 available to the LCD controller I can wire them up and neither users nor programmers will know anything is amiss.  (Unless they look directly at the hardware LUT encoding.)

But direct colour mode - where you write 16-bit pixels and they get fed out to the matching pins by the LCD controller - is a non-starter, because a good number of those matching pins simply aren't there if you also want Ethernet.  Which is a pain because I had some ideas for using that behind the scenes to expand on what the hardware can deliver directly.

An option would be to move Ethernet off to a separate chip, but QSPI also interferes with some of the LCD pins, and the whole point of that is that it allows you to memory-map NOR flash and run code straight out of cheap external ROMs.

There is a fix that solves everything, but it introduces its own problems.  There's a 265 pin BGA package of this chip that has all the LCD controller signals on their own dedicated pins.  No conflicts with anything at all.  And physically it's the same size as the 100-pin version.

But (a) BGA packages are a huge pain to prototype with, (b) it costs 50% more, and (c) it would likely require a 6-layer board just to route out all those signals.  It would be cheaper to add two more of the 100-pin version than to do that.

Well, I'll keep plugging away.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 11 2019 10:16 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, August 11 2019 12:57 PM (PiXy!)

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• Intel is preparing a workstation-class NUC called Quartz Canyon.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Up to 8 core Xeon CPUs, ECC RAM, dual Thunderbolt and dual Ethernet, room for a full-size graphics card, and a 500W power supply.
  
  In what sense is that a NUC?
  
  
• Seriously guys, check that you have everything with you before you get out of the car.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  It was only three months ago that you lost a billion dollars, Uber, and now you've done it again?
  
  
• Left-wing crazies were camped out on Senator McConnell's lawn threatening bloody mayhem.  McConnell's communications team posted a video of these activities to Twitter.
  
  Twitter suspended their account.  No, not the violent crazy people, the communications team.
  
  
  
  
  
• Phison, the company that had PCIe 4.0 SSDs ready to go the day PCIe 4.0 landed on the desktop, has announced their second generation PCIe 4.0 SSD controller chips.  (AnandTech)
  
  These won't hit the retail channel until this time next year, but when they do they'll be capable of 7GB per second read and write speeds, not the miserable 5GB per second of current models.  Random I/O will increase from 750K IOPS to 1M for both read and write.

I've found an alternate source selling the H750 CPU for A$6 in qty 5.  I thought at first it was an error and that was the US price (which would be about right) but it seems to be real.  That's just over half what I was looking at for qty 1, and I'll go through five in zero time once I start making prototypes.  Particularly if I do the soldering.

Still a markup on the volume price (US$3.30) but they can't be making a lot of money. 

So, anyway, this means I could use two of them.  And still come out cheaper, now that I've eliminated the FPGA.  That would let me zap the two CPLDs as well, because one was serving as the console output and with two CPUs I'd have two LCD controllers, and the other was a port multiplexer, and with two CPUs I'd have (almost) twice as many ports.

I still need to put the pinout into a spreadsheet and work out which ports conflict with which other ports.  The configuration for pin 5 on the TQFP-100 package, for example, is:

TRACED3, TIM1_BKIN2, SAI1_D1, TIM15_CH2, SPI4_MOSI, SAI1_SD_A, SAI4_SD_A, SAI4_D1, SAI2_MCLK_B, TIM1_BKIN2_COMP12, FMC_A22, DCMI_D7, LCD_G1, EVENTOUT

You get to pick exactly one of those functions.  Since I'm using the LCD controller, I need LCD_G1, so SPI4 is disabled - or at least, I can't use it on that pin.  Some peripherals can be routed to more than one pin.  I need the LCD controller and Ethernet - there's only one of each - and then at least two of the SPI ports and two of the I2C ports.  And both the USB ports, and one of the MMC ports if at all possible.  I expect some juggling to be involved.

If I use two CPUs I can drop the internal USB hub as well.  That will reduce the total number of ports from five to four, but that's okay.  External USB hubs are not hard to find.

Let me throw that all into the BOM tool...  A$34.58 each for qty 5.  A$29.85 in qty 50.  I use a bunch of tiny surface-mount resistors and capacitors, and those are expensive if you're only buying five or ten; you really need to buy hundreds at a time, and they want you to buy thousands.  But since I use a bunch of them, qty 50 is enough to push through several price breaks.

But $35 in tiny volumes with dual processors and dual video displays - and double the RAM and ROM; I budgeted that in as well - is not bad at all.  I like the Renesas RZ/A1M partly because it has dual LCD controllers, but so do two H750s, and they're a lot cheaper.

Back before the Amiga 1500, there was something called the A1500 from Checkmate, a tiny computer reseller in the UK.  They didn't make computers; what they did was make desktop cases, buy Amiga 500s, and put the motherboard into the desktop case.

Then Commodore stomped on them.

Years later Commodore is gone but Checkmate is back.