Saturday, August 18

Geek

Daily News Stuff 18 August 2018

Tech News

  • RAM prices may drop 25% next year. (Tom's Hardware)

    Well, it's a start, but it would still leave prices at more than twice their low point five years ago.

  • ARM unveiled their client CPU roadmap and intentions to challenge Intel. (AnandTech)

    Ooh! New architecture?

    No.

    Well, new cores then?

    No.

    So... Marketing?

    Marketing.


  • MSI's PS42 laptop is a 14" model with 1080p screen (adequate), quad core CPU (good), optional discrete GPU (great - oh, it's a crappy MX150, never mind) and A SENSIBLE KEYBOARD LAYOUT. (AnandTech)
    https://ai.mee.nu/images/SensibleKeyboard.png?size=720x&q=95
    Wait, why is the trackpad all the way over there? And... Is that the webcam? DAMMIT MSI!

  • New Jersey's court IT is run by idiots. Claiming changes done in order to comply with NIST recommendations, they have done exactly what NIST recommends against - maximum (not minimum!) password lengths, mandatory expiry, and security questions. (TechDirt)

  • FASTER is a fast open source key-value store (the core of a database) from Microsoft. How fast? Up to 160 million operations per second fast.

    Ooh! It supports some sort of binary tree for sorting?

    No, only hashes. (PDF)

    Well fuck.


    (You can build any data structure on top of a binary tree. You can only build unordered structures on top of a hash, which is far more constraining.)

  • 24 cores and I can't type an email.

    A day in the life of a Chrome developer at Google gives you great insight into why everything sucks so much on modern computers.

  • The Protectli FW4A is a four-port firewall appliance for small(ish) offices. Install your own OS - there are various BSD and Linux distributions designed for exactly this. All the network controllers are Intel, so it should be compatible with anything and everything. (ServeTheHome)

    The thing I noted is that it has a VGA port. That's pretty much essential because the alternative is rigging a serial connection somehow. But I don't have anything on my desk that takes VGA in - I'd have to dig an old monitor out of the spare room.

    Its big brother (sister?) the FW6A has six ports (fairly obvious) and includes HDMI. It's not much more expensive - $419 vs $349 including memory and storage, and includes a lot more USB ports - and you don't need to dumpster dive for a monitor to set it up. Go for that one. Or just air gap your coworkers, that's pretty good too.

  • Princess Evolution RaaS is not a poorly translated FM Towns game from 1993. Well, it might be that too, who knows. But the gameplay in the 2018 version sucks. (Bleeping Computer)

  • AMD is now shipping their 35W low-power desktop APUs, the 2200GE and 2400GE. These have the same specs as the 2200G and 2400G except for clock speed. Capped at 35W instead of 65W they will throttle under load much sooner. (FanlessTech)

    AMD is also believed to be planning a 45W high-power laptop chip to complement their existing 25W laptop parts. And when I say "believed to be planning" I mean "everything except the price and ship date has been leaked".


Social Media News



Video of the Day


Intel is run by poopy heads.


Music Video of the Day




Picture of the Day

https://ai.mee.nu/files/Pirates.png?size=720x&q=95

Pixel pirates from PixelJoint. This was cut into tiles and created by 33 different artists, but works very well on the whole.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:03 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 921 words, total size 10 kb.

1 DRAM has been a boom & bust business for decades (at least since the 1980s). The big drivers are the long lead times and immense cost to bringing on new DRAM fab capacity and that most DRAMs are built to common specs and hence are commodities. Demand is hard to predict that far out and supply is as well unless there is industry collusion.

Posted by: Kayle at Saturday, August 18 2018 03:13 PM (JIRac)

2 Yeah, the 2013 bust was great for PC builders but DRAM manufacturers went broke.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, August 18 2018 03:15 PM (PiXy!)

3

I like Stardock and Brad Wardell, though at least one of their games has given me reason to doubt my appreciation of them (Elemental had some terrible game mechanics that I had to wonder why no one managed to kill them during development.).  The GalCiv seriesm is, with one aspect, the best space strategy game I have ever played.  I have no doubt that they will do a very good job on the new Star Control game...

...It is just that the legal issues surrounding it, them, and Toys for Bob, have led to a mess that does not speak well of any of the parties involved.  It is probably at the point where all the parties involved should be locked into a room and not allowed to come out until they either settle the case or only one side is left alive.

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, August 19 2018 03:32 AM (BcQU4)

4

"The GalCiv series are, except for one aspect, the best space strategy games I have ever played."

Yikes did the original line not come out well.

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, August 19 2018 03:34 AM (BcQU4)

5 "Marketing."

Well, if tick-tock-tock-tock-tock-tock-tock worked for Intel....

 

But I don't have anything on my desk that takes VGA in - I'd have to dig an old monitor out of the spare room.

Converters are cheap. Surely you've got an HDMI or DVI out?

elected idiots

Come for the government idiocy, stay for the gratuitous Trump bashing, too!

That Medium story about ending anonymity on Twitter? Guy's a moron. Plenty of people say stuff he complains about under their own names.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 19 2018 08:55 AM (ITnFO)

6 HDMI to VGA is cheap.  Not sure if VGA to HDMI is that cheap, but I'll take a look.  Useful thing to have in my box of random bits.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, August 19 2018 10:55 AM (PiXy!)

7 It turns out it's not particularly cheap.  At least, the first two I found on Micro Center's website were $40 and $50.
What about DVI?  VGA male to DVI female are around $10-15.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 19 2018 11:07 AM (ITnFO)

8 VGA to HDMI doesn't seem to be that bad if you look around a little, maybe catch something on sale (what about Australia? There too). Hmm...I might pick one up just for the absurd pleasure of running my replica Craft board on a 4K TV...

Posted by: benzeen at Sunday, August 19 2018 03:00 PM (JpDcM)

9 Thanks, at that price it's certainly worth keeping one around.

My old Dell monitor had every input in the world - well, not the latest stuff, since the was my old monitor, but composite and S-video and component and VGA and DVI and HDMI.  But it got a bad case of LCD rot and I chucked it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, August 19 2018 03:38 PM (PiXy!)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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