Tuesday, August 02

Geek

Daily News Stuff 2 August 2022

Coat Of Arms Edition

Top Story

  • Just on that "best small laptop" from yesterday: It's a great deal in the US ($1029) but crazy expensive in Australia ($2699).

    By comparison the Dell Inspiron 16 Plus - the top of the line model - is...  Oh.  Well, I guess they've fixed that then.  I'll wait for that to go on sale as well.  At US$1949 vs. A$3399 it's pretty close to what I'd expect (the Australian price includes sales tax) but it was A$2499 last week.


  • Congress has said the CHIPS Act is not a $50 billion cash grab for semiconductor companies.  (The Register)

    "Yeah, sure" say the semiconductor companies standing in line with their hands out.

Tech News

  • If you want a Radeon 6900XT now might be the time.  I'm seeing them cheaper than the 6800XT, 6800, 6750XT, and some models of 6700XT.  Of course there will be new cards coming along soon but pricing and availability of those is a big unknown right now.

    It's one of the cheapest cards around relative to recent prices.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Not cheap in absolute terms though.


  • Intel's Sapphire Rapids server CPUs are reportedly on their 12th revision ("respin") already and aren't even shipping yet.  (Tom's Hardware)

    It's completely normal for a new chip to require a couple of hardware revisions before launch - expensive, but normal.  Twelve is unusual.


  • Is Winamp back to whip the llama's ass?  (Bleeping Computer)

    Maybe.  The project has been migrated from Visual Studio 2008 to VS 2019 so that they can actually compile it for modern operating systems, and there's a new release available to download.  Not a lot of new features yet though.


  • China's new 7nm chips aren't.  (The Register)

    All those numbers are marketing bullshit anyway, but this is a double helping.  China doesn't have access to the EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography equipment, or the components for that equipment, or the machines to make those components, so what they've done is applied older DUV processes and used multi-patterning to produce chips that they then slap a 7nm label on.

    Basically, what they have is Intel's 14nm+n, for some value of n that doesn't matter because increasing n doesn't change anything.


Disclaimer: I must go, my planet needs me.  Again.  Useless, the lot of them.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:22 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 385 words, total size 3 kb.

1 "features"

Well, you could play audio, it had equalization, loadable playlists worked, and it could stream audio from Internet.  Oh, and it had all those ridiculous gfx plugins that were so plopular back in the 1990s.  Trying to think of a feature that would improve anything.  Ads, maybe?  Subscription popups?

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, August 02 2022 09:40 PM (obo9H)

2 I'm actually on the hunt for a better music player, I've got about 28k songs, and almost all the current players will not "randomize all", they'll just make a random playlist of about 300 songs and repeat that.

Posted by: David Eastman at Wednesday, August 03 2022 03:06 AM (D6Mju)

3 I used to use mp3blaster, which had great radomization and grouping features.  Now-a-days, though I typically just use mplayer -novideo and play albums. without any stirring or scrambling of the playlists.

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, August 03 2022 08:10 AM (obo9H)

4 I used to use MediaMonkey to handle my large media library and if I recall correctly it did have a rolling randomize (ie it would put a  play list of X songs and as 1 played, put another at the end).  Unfortunately they recently did a complete rewrite for the latest version and I'm not certain if it is feature complete to the prior version yet.  It was one of the major applications I really missed moving over to Linux as I've found most of the Linux media players either don't handle large libraries or don't handle video formats, whereas MediaMonkey did both.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Wednesday, August 03 2022 12:00 PM (NkDYt)

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




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