• lunasvg is a standalone SVG rendering library.  (GitHub)
  
  If you compile the library you also get a command line tool to convert SVG to PNG.
  
  I'm going to have to try this because our current SVG rendering pipeline at my day job is sub-optimal, and by sub-optimal I mean fucked.
  
  
  
• Loading CSV at 2GB per second  (Liuliu.me)
  
  By parallelising the parser.
  
  This presupposes the existence of many gigabytes of CSV, which is not a world I choose to live in.
  
  
  
• NiLang is a DSL for writing reversible code in Julia.  (GitHub)
  
  I sort of understand what's going on here.  Any function you define with this approach automatically generates its inverse.  Don't ask me how, though.
  
  
  
• All memory is the same speed.  (AnandTech)
  
  Whether it's DDR-333 or DDR5-6400, the access time is about 15ns.

Biped Video of the Day

Don't Try to Learn English From Anime Either Video of the Day

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• Had a stomach bug Friday and then fell asleep before posting the update Saturday, so it's two short updates today.
  
  
  
• You can't run Star Citizen on a Pentium anymore.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Also, the game still isn't out.
  
  
  
• Razer's Blade Stealth 13 is getting a tiger in the tank.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Base price of the new model is $1799 for a quad-core Tiger Lake, 1650 Ti, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, and a 13" 1080p 120Hz display.
  
  Yesterday's Acer Nitro 5 tops out at $1099 with an eight core Ryzen, 1650 Ti, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, and a 15" 1080p 144Hz display.
  
  So that's what you're paying to have your hardware squoze into a smaller form factor.
  
  
  
• Benchmarking the Xeon W-1270.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It looks great as long as you don't compare it with Ryzen.
  
  I was looking at getting a W-1290P server - the workstation edition of the 10900K - but it's not that much faster than our existing 3700X and the current motherboards don't support IPMI.  A 5900X looks to be a much better choice long term.
  
  
  
• Scientists have found a more efficient way to optimise the Travelling Salesman Problem.  (Quanta)
  
  Yes, it's only 0.0000000000000000000000000000000002% better, but they've only been working on this since 1976.
  
  
  
• The assholes at ZDNet just sent up the defamation lawsuit signal.  (ZDNet)
  
  Where the hell are their editors?
  
  
  
• The judge in the Epic/Apple battle awarded a stay on half of Apple's assault on consumers.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Apple can boot Fortnite, but is blocked from doing the same to Unreal Engine.
  
  
  
• Twitter giveth:
  
  
  
  
  
  
• And Twitter telleth you to get fucked:
  
  
  
  
  
  

• Hololive livestreams are a train wreck here in Australia.  They disable rewind, and that seems to completely ruin YouTube's streaming.
  
  On this laptop I can play regular videos perfectly fine, but Hololive livestreams are a stuttering unwatchable mess even dialed all the way down to 144p.
  
  Given that they make all their money from livestreams, this seems like a problem.
  
  Update: Huh.  Working today.
  
  
  
• The 2020 Acer Nitro 5 brings Renoir and Turing together starting at just $669.  (AnandTech)
  
  I/O is good, with USB-A and C ports, wired Ethernet, and HDMI, and expandability is great with user-upgradeable RAM, two M.2 slots, and a 2.5" drive bay.
  
  CPU performance is great as you'd expect from a 6 Ryzen 4500U, and gaming on the GTX 1650 is pretty solid, though it won't hit 60 FPS on max settings on some games.
  
  Most interesting is that for a cheap gaming laptop the battery life is not at all bad - 4 hours of gameplay or 10 hours watching movies.
  
  Downside is it weighs an old-school 2.4kg.
  
  It does have the Four Essential Keys, but in the form of a full numeric keypad, which I don't like on a laptop.  But YMMV.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Ryzen performance AMD announced the Ryzen 5000 lineup just as they announced they were going to announce.  (AnandTech)
  
  19% higher average IPC measured as the geometric mean across 25 benchmarks.  AMD says it's faster than both the 10900K and the 1185G7 on single-threaded tasks.  The latter is a laptop chip but should still be hitting its rated clock on a single core, so it's a fair test.  It will of course crush Intel on multi-threaded tasks.
  
  Clock speeds increased only marginally, by 100-200MHz, but it's the same TSMC 7nm process and the same TDP, so that's to be expected.
  
  Price got a $50 increase on all chips, so it now ranges from $299 for six cores to $799 for sixteen.
  
  No mention yet of new Threadripper or Epyc parts, though we can be sure they are on the way; they will use the same CPU dies as these Ryzen parts, and the same I/O dies as existing Threadripper and Epyc.
  
  
  
• AMD is reportedly looking to take advantage of it's restored market valuation to buy Xilinx.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That would be an interesting acquisition.  Xilinx is one of the two main FPGA vendors; the other, Altera, got swallowed by Intel about five years ago.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Sunday, October 11 2020 12:03 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, October 11 2020 04:53 AM (eqaFC)

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• Intel announced its new Rocket Lake desktop CPU lineup.  (AnandTech)
  
  They will ship....  Around the middle of March.  Yes, seriously.
  
  
  
• AMD is announcing its own new CPU family.  But the announcement is at 3AM and I'm old and tired and have a work meeting first thing in the morning, so here's the link.
  
  
  
  The last time I intentionally stayed up for something like this was Google I/O hoping for a new generation of Nexus 7.  Boy was that a waste of time.
  
  
  
• Western Digital's new PCIe 4.0 Black SN850 SSDs are twice as fast as their Blue SN550 for twice the price.  (AnandTech)
  
  Or - bear with me here, this is complicated - you could just buy two Blue SN550s.
  
  
  
• Phil Shoemaker, former head of Apple's App Store, gave testimony before the House Judiciary Committee's review of big-tech monopolies.  (iMore)
  
  He said that Apple's policies are arbitrary and deliberately and explicitly anti-competitive, and that Apple consistently violates its own rules when it sees a benefit.
  
  Apple was not happy.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, October 08 2020 11:48 PM (eqaFC)

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• Wonderduck pointed out the reason for my bizarre and wonderful YouTube feed - not YouTube itself (or chronosynclastic infundibuli) but a caching bug in Google Translate.
  
  Subscribe to thirty-five Hololive channels all at once and you too can experience the joys of LexxTube.
  
  
  
• And also two hours of adorable insanity as Korone plays Untitled Rat Game.
  
  
  
  
  
• The House Judiciary Committee has produced a report recommending that AAFG be regulated or broken up.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  This is the majority report.  That is, it's written by the Democrat members of the committee.  And the big tech companies are the Democrats' best friends in the world.
  
  The chaos should be delightful to watch.
  
  Not that they are wrong.
  
  
  
• Netflix are left out of this report.  But that's okay because they've been indicted on criminal charges over Cuties.  (TMZ)
  
  I expect that to go nowhere, and to go nowhere far more quickly and at less expense than the antitrust action, but still, popcorn futures.
  
  
  
• In actual tech news ASRock has some new STX-format Tiger Lake motherboards.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These don't have USB4, but given what I just learned about USB4 that's probably for the best.
  
  They do have two network ports (2.5Gb and 1Gb) and four HDMI ports, including one at the front.  Which is not something you'd need every day but would be really useful for a test-bench machine.
  
  
  
• Apple's T2 security chip is broken and unfixable.  (ironPeak)
  
  If you allow untrusted parties unsupervised physical access to your Mac.  So don't do that.
  
  
  

Please Don't Suck Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Thursday, October 08 2020 12:21 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, October 09 2020 06:11 AM (vNkOW)

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• Nvidia can now reduce the bandwidth required for your next conference call to just a few kilobytes per second.
  
  
  
  
  Plus you can have doggy ears.
  
  
  
• The first DDR5 modules are showing up.  (AnandTech)
  
  Unless I've missed something, there is currently no hardware for these to plug into.
  
  
  
• It's even worse than you thought.  (AnandTech)
  
  One of those rare cases where it pays to read the comments.
  
  USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 is 20Gbps USB.  USB 4 is 40Gbps USB.  USB 4 may or may not support USB 3.2 Gen 2x2.  And, depending on the individual controller chip, it may not support USB at speeds greater than 10Gbps at all, despite the fact that it is USB and supports speeds of 40Gbps.
  
  If that sounds absurd, well, yes.
  
  
  
• Python 3.9 is here.  (Python.org)
  
  I spend most of my programming hours working in Python and I don't care about this release at all.  On the other hand, the last groundbreaking release of Python took them five years to recover from, so maybe that's good.
  
  
  
• Unfortunately YouTube fixed my feed and I'm no longer receiving videos from a
  parallel universe.
  
  
  
• Happened to be online right when the latest SpaceX Starlink launch went up.
  
  Whoosh!  And then a few minutes later, hsoohw! and the first stage lands dead center on the recovery ship without so much as a bobble.
  
  
  

LexxTube: Videos From a Parallel Universe

Other Linus Eat Your Heart Out Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, October 07 2020 01:52 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 07 2020 09:32 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, October 07 2020 11:12 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, October 07 2020 11:41 AM (PiXy!)

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• You can run Doom 3 on an RTX 3090.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Literally in this case, using that 24GB GDDR6X as a RAM disk.
  
  
  
• An Xbox Series X gameplay preview preview.
  
  
  
  Some people have the Series X already, but no games are available for it yet, so these are all unoptimised Xbox One games running at 4k.  Still looks pretty good.
  
  
  
• Using Windows kernel timers.  (Random ASCII)
  
  This is horrible.
  
  Nim's os.sleep takes a value in milliseconds, but Windows itself doesn't necessarily do what you ask it to.  I'll see what happens.
  
  
  
• The 2TB Western Digital Blue SN550 now sells in Australia for less than twice the price of the 1TB model.  Before it was around two-and-a-half times.
  
  Very tempted.  It's not a high-end drive, but will do just fine for now, and when I get a new system in a year or two will make a great data drive.
  
  
  
• A roundup of new laptops.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  I've already mentioned the Lenovo and HP models, but Dell has also announced Tiger Lake updates for the XPS 13.
  
  
  

Doog Video of the Day

Bonus Doog Video of the Day

Very Angry Dog Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, October 05 2020 11:57 PM (eqaFC)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tuesday, October 06 2020 05:21 AM (5iiQK)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, October 06 2020 09:32 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, October 06 2020 09:33 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 06 2020 10:09 AM (eqaFC)

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• AMD has a Green Sardine.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This particular colourful fish looks like it's a new APU rather than another GPU.  Zen 3 launches in a few days, and the new Radeon cards later this month, so we'll have the details soon enough.
  
  
  
• Please don't click on the buttons.
  
  
  
• NestedText is YAML with the insanity removed.  (NestedText)
  
  Since that's about 98% of YAML, it makes for a fairly clean and simple spec.  It's only for config files, and everything's a string.
  
  
  
• Ubuntu 20.10 beta is here.  (Phoronix)
  
  I've been pretty impressed with the reliability of 20.04 - I've been running it in production since June without anything weird happening.
  
  
  
• PHP 8 RC1 is here too.  (Phoronix)
  
  Why?

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Monday, October 05 2020 08:02 AM (v29Tn)

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• The 11th generation ZenBook 13 doesn't look terrible.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a Tiger Lake when I'd rather see a Ryzen, but it has 16GB LPDDR4X RAM, 1TB of NVMe storage, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, one USB Type A, HDMI, and microSD, and a 13" 1080p display for $1000.
  
  No headphone jack, but the Four Essential Keys are in place and the trackpad turns into a numeric keypad if for some weird reason you want it to do that.
  
  
  
• I wasn't kidding about the pixel packing plant.
  
  
  
  
  
• Displaying full-motion video on an IBM PC.  (Oldskooler Ramblings)
  
  And when I say IBM PC I mean 4.77MHz 8088 and a CGA card.
  
  
  
• I could totally see The Cyberiad being turned into an indie game but instead they've chosen to make a game from Stanislaw Lem's The Invincible which I haven't read.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It's due out the second half of 2021.
  
  
  
• Should you buy this $1100 Z490 motherboard?  No.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's not bad.  It's by no means bad.  It's just that it will be obsolete within a year, and $1100 is $1100.
  
  
  
• Apple has released a fix to the patch for their recent update.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Good to see they're keeping on top of things.
  
  
  

Bonus Frittering Away the Long Weekend Watching Hololive Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Saturday, October 03 2020 11:50 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sunday, October 04 2020 07:44 AM (5iiQK)

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• 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!)

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