You're Amelia!
You're late!
Amelia Pond! You're the little girl!
I'm Amelia, and you're late.

Friday, October 02

Geek

Daily News Stuff 1 October 2020

Drizztless Edition

Tech News

  • 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)

    http://ai.mee.nu/images/PCjrjrjr.jpg?size=640x&q=95

    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

The Elf and the Hunter's Item Atelier is a delightful fluffy-wuffy story about an elf and her cough loyal human assistant cough who run a crafting service in a fantasy world that doesn't make a whole lot of sense but the art is wonderful.  Also when occasion calls for it our innocent little elf has a mouth on her that would have a Marine drill sergeant taking notes.

/images/ItemAtelier1.jpeg?size=360x&q=95/images/ItemAtelier2.jpeg?size=360x&q=95/images/ItemAtelier3.jpeg?size=360x&q=95/images/ItemAtelier4.jpg?size=360x&q=95


Disclaimer: Yes, I will read anything with the word "atelier" in the title, why do you ask?

more...

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Wednesday, September 30

Geek

Daily News Stuff 30 September 2020

Never Ever Edition

Tech News

  • 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.


Disclaimer: And seven times never buy a Mac.

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Geek

Daily News Stuff 29 September 2020

Leekspin And Potato Soup Edition

Tech News

  • 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



Actually, I think there's only the one catgirl in there.  One fox, one dog-girl, two bunnies.


Disclaimer: I am not the Scatman.

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Monday, September 28

Geek

Daily News Stuff 28 September 2020

Token Angels Edition

Tech News

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




Disclaimer: And if thou gaze long into the simulation, the simulation will also gaze into thee.

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Geek

Daily News Stuff 27 September 2020

Short And Sweet Edition

Tech News

  • 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."


Disclaimer: We tried doing nothing, and now we're out of ideas.

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Saturday, September 26

Geek

Daily News Stuff 26 September 2020

Buried Ledes Edition

Tech News

  • 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.


Manga Notes

Sousou no Frieren translates to Frieren at the Funeral.  Frieren is an elf; decades ago she was one of the heroes who defeated the Demon King and saved the world.  Now only two of the heroes remain; she has watched most of her companions die, not in battle but of old age, while she remains unchanged.

The demon army is on the move again, and Frieren is the only one still able to answer the call.  And it turns out that Sousou no Frieren also translates to Frieren of the Funeral, because she's all out of bubblegum.

It's quite good, both aspects of it.  And it runs weekly so you're not left hanging on forever.

http://ai.mee.nu/images/Frieren1.jpg?size=360x&q=95http://ai.mee.nu/images/Frieren2.jpg?size=360x&q=95


Disclaimer: Crikey, it's a rock.

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Geek

Daily News Stuff 25 September 2020

Super Secret Edition

Tech News

  • 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.


Disclaimer: Nope, still blaargh.

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Friday, September 25

Geek

Daily News Stuff 24 September 2020

Never Mind The Quality Feel The Width Edition

Tech News

Disclaimer: Blaargh.

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Thursday, September 24

Geek

Daily News Stuff 23 September 2020

Ugh Blockchain Edition

Tech News

  • 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.


Disclaimer: Not that there's any great demand for more Atlantic think-pieces, fake or otherwise.

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Wednesday, September 23

Geek

Daily News Stuff 22 September 2020

Ugh Browsers Proxy Servers Edition

Tech News

  • There's another update out for Chrome already.  Does it fix anything?  It does not.

    Bah.  I'll test a workaround for this mess after I post the news stuff.

    Update: The problem was ENTIRELY DIFFERENT TO WHAT I THOUGHT IT WAS AND NOT A BROWSER ISSUE AT ALL.

    Also, fixed.

    Basically, Caddy (the proxy server we use) failed to automatically renew some of our SSL certificates.  Don't know why exactly, except that it's been running for several months without a restart.

    We've been running it for a couple of years at my day job without this happening, but we push config changes every couple of weeks so it never runs that long without a reload.

    Common JavaScript files for mee.nu live on a shared domain and are always loaded over HTTPS.  That stopped working a couple of days ago.  I'm kind of impressed by how few things broke.


  • Arm has announced two new server cores.  (AnandTech)

    The N2 - codename Perseus - offers a 40% IPC improvement over the N1 core that Amazon is using in its Graviton 2 server platform.

    That's quite a lot.  That performance will also be coming to the A79 or whatever they choose to call their next mobile core.  N2 is due out next year.

    The V1 on the other hand is their new performance core.  Yes, the 40% IPC improvement over their current best offering is now their mid-range core.

    V1 - codename Zeus - promises 50% better IPC than N1 at the same clock speed, plus better clock speeds, and double the floating-point performance of the N2.  Arm estimate overall V1 will be around 20% faster than N2.  And it's available to license today.  

    This is the core used by the SiPearl Rhea that I mentioned previously.

    The V1 is a maximum-performance damn-the-power-consumption design and will not be coming to mobile devices, but it's what Arm needs if they are to compete with AMD in the server space.

    Serve the Home has more.


  • Microsoft is buying Bethesda.  (Thurrott.com)

    Makers of the bad Fallout games.

    It's a shame Microsoft wasn't in the mood when Bioware was on the market.


  • Planet K2-315b has a surface temperature of around 180C (350C) and is "likely not habitable".  (CNet)

    It also orbits its star, EPIC 249631677, in just 3.14 days.

    EPIC 249631677 - let's call it Ted - is 57 parsecs from Earth and not exactly suitable for daytrips anyway.


  • Memory price trends, 1957-2020.  (JCM)

    Interesting to note that early on, vacuum tubes were cheaper than transistors.  I'm guessing though that even in the 50s transistors were a lot more reliable.


  • Okay, since I have that weird comment thing fixed, time to think about game programming on the Imagine.

    Let's take Civilisation - not the popular game, that's spelled with a Z.

    The Pangea tileset that inspired this is 16x16, perfect for the Imagine's tilemap mode.  Load the tiles into RAM once, create a map - a 100x80 world map is just 8k - use sprites for the units, and we're good to go.

    Except...  Not so fast.  Look at this example.

    http://ai.mee.nu/images/ImagineCivimap.gif

    We don't just have the background tiles.  The background tiles are overlaid by terrain and vegetation, rivers, roads, and railroads.  Rivers over terrain can be overlaid by road and railroad bridges. Resources and resource icons overlay terrain and vegetation.  Water is animated.  And over all that there's a rather literal fog of war for unexplored territory.

    Handling all that would require a separate 32-colour full-resolution overlay playfield, and the original Imagine 1000 can't quite manage that; it runs out of clock cycles to access everything.

    So instead it has to be done in pixel mode, and that eats 64k of RAM on top of all the tiles and sprites that need to be loaded.

    There's a reason Civilization - the one with the Z - didn't come out in 1983.

    Looking at the tileset, all the animations for all the units combined are only 40k.  But with 64k assigned to the pixel map, we only have 192k for all the tiles, sprites, code, and data combined.  In virtual 1983, 40k is a lot.

    This is where we say things like "combat animations require the optional 128k RAM expansion cartridge ($89.95)".


  • Ram Packs for Everyone!

    Figured out a two-chip solution that makes the Imagine about eleventeen times better.

    So, the design has three main chips: The CPU, the DSP, which we're going to completely ignore, and the video controller.

    There's 128k of system RAM - called shared RAM for reasons we'll get to in a moment - and 128k of video RAM.

    The video controller has two full buses, and can directly access both video RAM and system RAM.  It was ostensibly designed as a standalone controller for graphics terminals, needing just a suitable UART and ROMs for the code and fonts; one bus for video data and the other bus for everything else.

    It can also use both memory buses for video data.  This lets the Imagine display two playfields at 480x270 in 32 colours, at the cost of absolutely squashing CPU performance.

    While scanning through 1980s Toshiba component databooks looking for memory timing information, I noted in passing that there was a standard 74LS part for a 10-bit three-state bus transceiver.*  Caught my attention because I was looking up stuff for a fantasy 10-bit computer.

    Now, what happens if we take two of those chips, and put them on the data and address buses, so that on one side is the video controller and the two built-in memory banks, and on the other side is everything else?

    Well, if you don't have a RAM cartridge, not much.  The CPU is now free to access ROM on cycles when the video controller is accessing shared RAM, but that's a minor win because the built-in Basic is a compiler anyway.

    If you do have a RAM cartridge, though, that means the CPU can run at full speed even while the video controller is using all the bandwidth of both internal memory buses.  Instead of just giving you 128k of system RAM, it doubles the graphics capabilities of the system.  We can even do a tweak and split sprites across the buses so that they can each be 20 pixels wide instead of just 10.

    With a later 256k or 512k RAM cartridge things get even better.

    So yes, those two chips go in.  

    * The original part was a 74LS861, I think; that's the modern equivalent.


Apropos of Nothing

http://ai.mee.nu/images/NotSoMuch.png


Disclaimer: Fucking Elasticsearch.  28,000 records total.  4.5GHz CPU.  128GB RAM.  Seven second search times.

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