• Rogue Trader is a Traveller-style tabletop RPG set in the Warhammer 40K universe.  Humble's latest bundle gives you the 400-page core rules, a 250-page campaign expansion, and two short introductory adventures for a dollar.  (Humble Bundle)
  
  They still, for the most part, don't bother to list page counts; I got those numbers by buying the bundle and downloading the PDFs.  I'll go nag them about that on Twitter.
  
  (In case you're interested, the five books at the $8 level are 75, 14, 146, 73, and 147 pages respectively.)
  
  
• I've mentioned before that Cloudflare is bad simply by nature of the way it concentrates the web through a narrow funnel.
  
  Turns out it's bad in a whole lot of other ways as well, several of them deeply stupid.  (Devever)
  
  I'm not convinced of the conspiracy theory floated at the end of the article, but only because the US government has not demonstrated that level of competence in the last, oh, 70 years.
  
  
• Microsoft made a big thing of servicability of their new Surface Laptop 3.  Is it really an improvement?
  
  iFixit rates it a literally middling 5 out of 10.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  But that needs to be put into perspective against the original Surface Laptop and the Surface Laptop 2, both of which scored zero.
  
  
  
  The battery is glued in and the RAM cannot be upgraded, and the EM shields are fiddly, but overall it's not terrible.
  
  
• Samsung is forging ahead with its custom-designed M-series Arm cores.  The Exynos 990 will feature dual M5 cores and dual A76 cores on a 7nm EUV process.  (AnandTech)
  
  Plus all the usual stuff like an interface for 100MP+ camera sensors, a 10 trillion operation per second neural network / DSP engine, 8K video encode, and DDR5 RAM support.
  
  
• TSMC says 5nm is on track for volume production in Q2 of 2020.  (AnandTech)
  
  There seem to be some supply constraints with current 7nm based on the availability of higher-end Ryzen parts, but there's no denying that 7nm is working well.
  
  
• Meanwhile, Intel is expected to start slashing prices on existing desktop chips.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Cascade Lake X is half the price of Skylake X, but Skylake X is still shipping.  Just not shipping to anyone who has the option of holding off on their purchase for a few weeks.
  
  
• Is legislation forcing open APIs on massive social networks a threat or a menace?  The answer lies in whether the bill has a cutesy backronym.  (TechDirt)
  
  "ACCESS", huh?  Kill it with fire.
  
  
• In other news Google's Stadia game streaming service is doomed.  (TechDirt)
  
  
  
  
• It's zombies vs. robots as the House of Representatives grills Mark Zuckerberg over Libra.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Libra as originally envisaged is probably, yeah, you guessed it.
  
  
  
  But I've always been more interested in it as an open source technology platform than a global payment-slash-surveillance-network.
  
  
• Tesla made a profit after a couple of quarters of losses due to stuff.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
• Twitter also made a profit, somehow.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Don't look at me, I didn't do it.

Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 25 2019 12:40 AM (Iwkd4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment