Thursday, April 15

Geek

Daily News Stuff 15 April 2021

If At First You Don't Explode Edition

Top Story

  • The 23-year-old techie who supports the websites that are banned everywhere else.  (Bloomberg)

    Bloomberg thinks this is a bad thing.  And they approvingly quote absolute pychopaths:
    "Every time I see an article attacking social media companies—and they deserve it—I think it’s more important to go after the companies that are hosting terrorist material,” says Rita Katz, founder of SITE Intelligence Group, a nonprofit that tracks terrorist activity online. "There’s already a good recipe that was used for ISIS. Why don’t you use it on the far right?”
    Because, you rabidly insipid sea pickle, ISIS didn't just write bad words.  They raped, kidnapped, tortured, murdered, and enslaved their way across the Middle East until they were stopped.

    That's not protected by the First Amendment.  Speech is.  Even yours.

    I got this link from Slashdot, which once upon a time espoused views ranging from the libertarian to the anarcho-capitalist.  The commentariat now mostly treats 1984 as a cookbook.


    http://ai.mee.nu/images/RipAndTear640.jpg

    Rip and tear - with a smile!


Tech News

  • In a freak accident that I'm sure will not be repeated, my computer waited until after I saved this post before suddenly rebooting.


  • MSI drops drip.  (AnandTech)

    The MSI MEG Z590 Ace Gold is not a motherboard anyone should buy.  It does have dual Thunderbolt 4 ports, yes, and PCIe 4.0 and 2.5 gigabit Ethernet, but it's a high-end board designed for the 11th generation desktop family and Intel's 11th generation desktop parts are - at the high end - shit.

    And have a life span of maybe six months, because 12th gen - Alder Lake - is due out this year, and brings with it an entire new socket and chipset.


  • Parallels Desktop 16.5 lets you run Windows on the new Arm Macs.  (Tom's Hardware)

    This is an exercise in futility, though, because what it lets you run is Windows for Arm, not the regular x86 edition, and Windows for Arm has trouble running many mainstream apps and also isn't available.

    And beyond that, Arm Macs support a maximum of 16GB of RAM, not enough to do anything remotely serious with a virtualised Windows environment.  Linux, yes; even a 4GB virtual server can do useful stuff in Linux.  Windows, forget it.

    If you have one business application that's stuck on Windows and you absolutely have to buy a Mac and somehow that business application that is stuck on Windows can run on Windows for Arm, and you're prepared to wait for Windows for Arm to actually ship....  Then maybe.


  • Two Epyc Milan CPUs are faster at 3D rendering than a single Threadripper dunked in liquid nitrogen.  (WCCFTech)

    I'd kind of hope so, since they have twice the cores and a newer architecture - but the overclockers managed to get the Threadripper up from its base clock of 2.9GHz to an all-core 5.2GHz, which is a hell of a boost when you're talking about a 64 core part.


  • Google Chrome 90 is out and is HTTPS by default.  (Bleeping Computer)

    It doesn't seem to break sites that don't support HTTPS, and there are still quite a lot of those around.  It's good to see Google not screwing something up.


  • Washington state has passed a bill to reverse restrictions on community broadband.  (Motherboard)

    Rule of thumb: If Big Tech hates it, we should do more of it, even if the people passing this particular piece of legislation are clearly idiots.


  • The Asus ROG Zephyrus M16 does not have the Four Essential Keys.  (Hot Hardware)

    Oh well.  A decent keyboard layout is just too much to expect from Asus after all.


  • I have Cinescore installed again.

    Cinescore is an app from the now vanished Sony Creative Software (which in turn was originally a small US company called Sonic Foundry).  It let you take a musical theme - say, Dixieland Jazz - and essentially paint a piece of music based on this theme.  If you needed exactly four minutes of jazz to back a video clip, and you needed it to be quiet here and bold here you could tweak it to do just that without having to compose the entire piece from scratch.

    It was discontinued years ago, and in 2016 most of Sony Creative Software was sold off to a German company called Magix.

    I was just updating my Acid Pro license (a digital audio workstation) to the latest version to take advantage of a special deal, and noticed that they had all the software I had bought from Sony listed on my Magix account.

    And there was a download link for Cinescore.

    And the download link worked.

    The application requires registration, but the registration also worked.

    The program came out in 2006 and still seems to install and run perfectly.  I'm impressed.

    If I was on a Mac, I'd be screwed.  Macs can't run 32-bit apps at all anymore.


VTuber of the Day

Today's featured talent is Gawr Gura of Hololive English who just hit 2.5 million subscribers.  Her character is supposedly a 9000-year old shark from Atlantis, but she talks like an Iowa farm girl from 1958.



That short clip is taken from one of her Minecraft episodes, while she was building her shark hat house.



And it's engendered multiple callbacks.



If you want to find out what all this nonsense is about, perhaps the best place to start is her Bipeds stream with teammate Amelia Watson.  It's an early episode so it doesn't have too many oblique references, the interaction between Gura and Amelia is great, the game is fun, and it's complete in itself - they play through the entire co-op part of the game in one stream.



I don't suggest starting with her debut episode; she recently did a stream where she watched it herself, and died of embarrassment.  But she hit the mark pretty soon after that.


Disclaimer: Maybe not Iowa, I can't place American accents that well.  But definitely 1958.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:23 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 994 words, total size 8 kb.

1 The Zephyrus doesn't have the four keys on their own keys, but they are layered on the arrow keys at least, which is probably better than nothing.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 16 2021 01:29 AM (eqaFC)

2 That gets an F from me.  Without the labels it would be an F-.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, April 16 2021 03:03 AM (PiXy!)

3 Well I'd call that better!

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 16 2021 05:02 AM (eqaFC)

4 "They raped, kidnapped, tortured, murdered, and enslaved their way across the Middle East"
Well, but that was austere, religious rape, kidnapping, torture, etc.  The FAR-RIGHT uses words that haven't been approved for use.

Posted by: normal at Friday, April 16 2021 06:43 AM (obo9H)

5 The irony of the situation is that eventually, SITE and its' ilk will be called 'far right' and be purged and banned....And then the smarter and wiser of the lot (A small number to be sure.) will wonder where is everyone who should be helping them.

Meanwhile, I am watching the latest Dems' attempt at court packing appear to have a better than minimum chance of pushing through, because the GOP is incompetent and inept and the Supreme Court itself is suicidal in its' desire to maintain decorum.

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, April 16 2021 08:32 AM (4i7w0)

6 I may be insane, but the court packing may be entirely unimportant.

Consider the case that formal courts are illegitimate, with remedies devolving to vigilantism, until we hang enough of the sons of bitches to get a concession of wrong doing, and adjustment of behavior.

The judges do not have any awareness of having done wrong, and most of the lawyers likewise do not see it.  And under the formal system, we can not quietly bring it to the attention of the judges, because they refuse to listen to anyone who doesn't have a  JD, and isn't admitted to the bar.  Yeah, most of us laymen make an impossible mess when we try to grapple with the absurdities they have made of legal language, but we no longer have grounds to trust lawyers to act as agents on our behalf.

How the eff are we supposed to be gently remonstrating with these people?

Also, Gura is totally of a later period than 1958.  In that slip about the scent of freshly bleached laundry (which segued into "don't sniff bleach"), she mentions being taught to 'waft' scents from chemicals.  It is thus physically impossible for her to be speaking 1958 English; In 1958, they were still teaching highschool students to identify strong acids by taste.

The tragedy of our times is that only that second from last paragraph is obviously joking.  My other statements were serious, even if sleep deprived. 

Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, April 18 2021 12:22 AM (6y7dz)

Hide Comments | Add Comment




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




58kb generated in CPU 0.0159, elapsed 0.4454 seconds.
58 queries taking 0.4357 seconds, 344 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.