Friday, July 03

Geek

Daily News Stuff 2 July 2020

Hairy Wizard Edition

Tech News

  • Reminder that there are two new Dresden Files books due this year - Peace Talks lands this month, and Battle Ground in September.

    This was originally planned to be a single volume but Jim Butcher couldn't make it work.  Eventually his editor suggested making it two books, and Jim said, oh, yeah, and went away and rewrote it all.


  • If you need a shiny new dedicated server, redacted has the brand new and very shiny wait where did it go?

    They did have an offer on the brand new W-1290P, the workstation version of Intel's Core i9 10900K, but the post seems to have disappeared.  

    You can read about the W-1200 family even if you can't get one just yet.  (Intel)


  • A deep dive into Intel's Lakefield.  (AnandTech)

    I do not find this particularly exciting - one Core core and four Atom cores makes for a barely adequate experience at best - but maybe it's just what someone, somewhere is looking for.


  • HBM2E is memory taken to ludicrous speed.  (AnandTech)

    3600MHz is pretty common for DRAM these days, but having a 1024-bit bus on a single chip less so.


  • A closer look at LG's Gram 17.  (WCCFTech)

    This is a 3lb 17" laptop with a full keyboard and a 2560x1600 display.  If you need a big screen laptop that weighs less than some 13" models, this might be for you.  It's not exactly cheap, though, and gaming performance on the Core i7-1065G7 rates a "meh".


  • How much Python does a Python need to be a Python?  (Snarky)

    Asked in the context of getting something better than goddamn JavaScript to run on browsers, since WebAssembly's security model makes a full Python implementation problematic.

    The article also reminded me that there's an effort under way to implement Python in Rust.  (GitHub)  And that already runs under WebAssembly.


  • If you really miss Motif and CDE, SerenityOS might be just what you are looking for.



    Only...  Why?

    Well, aesthetics aside, it does seem to be a lightweight and fast little Unix-like OS.  Nothing wrong with that.


  • Rust is designed from the ground up to compile slowly.  (PingCAP)

    Much of this also applies to Crystal. 


  • Don't use closed-source encryption.  (Bleeping Computer)

    The EncroPhone network - popular among the criminal set - was infiltrated by law enforcement, mesages intercepted, and several hundred people arrested across Europe.

    My American readers will laugh though, to see the British police boast alongside siezing two tonnes of narcotics and 28 million tablets of very off-brand Valium, 1800 rounds of ammunition.


  • BDFL just don't mean what it used to.  (ZDNet)

    Salvatore Filippo, also known as Antirez, is stepping down from his role as chief maintainer of Redis.  Basically because he was finding he was spending more time as a manager than as a programmer.


  • The Blackview Tab 8 is a $160 Android tablet that doesn't seem to skimp too much on anything.  (ZDNet)

    Android 10, 1920x1200 display, 8-core 1.6GHz A55, 4GB RAM, 64GB EMMC, USB-C, SD card, dual SIM cards, headphone ja-

    Wait, 10" screen?  Then why did you bloody well call it the Tab 8?  Grumble grumble.


  • Microsoft is updating the start menu from being a shrieking dumpster fire to being merely a loudly cursing dumpster fire.  (Thurrott.com)

    Don't look at me, I've been running Start8 since back when it was still called Start8.


  • Kongregate is shutting down.  (TechRaptor)

    Not surprising given that Flash is dying at the end of the year, but a sad end of an era, brought about by Adobe's fuck-upedness.


  • Remember last year when I was fiddling with the idea of building a computer based on an embeded Arm chip and nothing ever came of it because that would actually require work?

    Well, someone actually did it.  (GeoffG.net)

    The Colour Maximite 2 is based on the same family of ST Micro Arm microcontrollers that I was looking at (and that I actually have a development kit for).

    It's not a complete custom board, using a rather nice module from Waveshare that includes the CPU, 8MB of RAM, headers for absolutely everything, and a USB port.

    The only problem is that the module itself costs US$30 and I was aiming for a system cost of around that.  I was using the cheapest member of the family but got derailed when I realised that it was not possible to do everything I wanted with the 100-pin package that version came in, and upgrading would instantly double the unit cost.

    Also I don't really know what I'm doing with this stuff, but I rarely let that stop me.


Anime News


Video of the Day

And here is the wee beastie itself.



It executes 270,000 lines of interpreted Basic per second, so Basic runs faster than assembler on an 8-bit era system.  It has a simple file manager but mainly it throws you straight into Basic with no complications to slow you down.

I may have to get one.  I'd need to dig out an old monitor though, since it only supports VGA - no DVI, which is the way I planned to go.


Disclaimer: Could get a VGA to HDMI converter, I guess.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:58 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 935 words, total size 9 kb.

1 Lakefield:  I think the story there is that there is a rumor there will be less-wimpy versions, e.g., a 6+6 core one, later.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 03 2020 03:58 AM (Iwkd4)

2 Put a 4700u in that LG gram and I'd be mighty tempted to pay $1800.  Intel?  Blech!

Posted by: normal at Friday, July 03 2020 12:05 PM (obo9H)

3 Although at that price point I think I'd prefer an upgraded ROG Zephyrus G14.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 03 2020 01:57 PM (Iwkd4)

4 The 17" 16:10 screen is the standout feature of the LG.  That's nearly 50% more screen area and double the pixels, and it actually weighs half a pound less than the Asus.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, July 03 2020 03:04 PM (PiXy!)

5 Ah.  I used to have a 17" Dell XPS--the last single-core generation, sadly--and I always felt it was unwieldy.  Of course modern laptops are a lot lighter, but it just still feels weird.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 03 2020 04:11 PM (Iwkd4)

6 My only complaint about the Dresden novels is that all the short stories he writes are in direct continuity, and usually referred to in the next book released, but not collected until much later.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, July 04 2020 02:49 AM (ZlYZd)

7 Best Dissertation Experts is one of the finest fora of providing the  best dissertation help through our online mentors where we make online essay and dissertations in a cheap rate in all around UK.

Posted by: Best Dissertation Experts at Saturday, July 04 2020 08:52 AM (yF8Jv)

Hide Comments | Add Comment




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




58kb generated in CPU 0.0384, elapsed 1.9867 seconds.
58 queries taking 1.9744 seconds, 345 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.