Wednesday, April 01

Geek

Daily News Stuff 1 April 2020

You Replaced My What With A What Edition

Not Exactly Tech News

  • The Atlantic embraces fascism.  (The Atlantic)

    This would have made a great April Fool's piece if they'd just held onto it for one more day.  Well, in Australia it already was.

    Adrian Vermeule argues that the actual meaning of the Constitution has become an obstacle to conservative goals, and so we must now make it mean whatever we want it to mean.

    This demented fuckwit is a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, but we've already seen that professors of constitutional law often have very little regard for the actual Constitution.

    Similar to the way ethicists are some of the worst monsters in history.


Tech News

  • Samsung is ceasing production of LCDs - including their own QLED designs.  (AnandTech)

    From now on it's just OLED.  I believe that small OLED screens have already passed price parity with LCD, but that's certainly not true for larger ones.


  • Xerox has decided it will hang on to it's $34 billion and forget about HP for now.  (Tech Crunch)

    Probably wise.


  • On second thought let's not go there.  It is a silly place.  (Tech Crunch)

    Interest in Zoom has spiked with the advent of our Global Lockdown, though I don't know why.  The company has a terrible track record.  I'd sooner use almost anything else.

    Others have come to the same conclusion. (Six Colors)

    Indeed, things at Zoom seem to be a bit of a mess.  (Vice)


  • Need a bit more power in your laptop than the Ryzen 4900HS can deliver?  The XMG APEX 15 is what you need unless it isn't.  (WCCFTech)

    I noted a while back - I think - that while the 12 core 65W Ryzen 3900 non-X is only available to OEMs, it doesn't matter because the standard 3900X, and indeed the 3800X and 3950X as well, can be configured to run at 65W.  Which is better because if you don't like the results you can configure it straight back to 105W.

    This laptop has done just that - well, the first part - with anything up to a Ryzen 9 3950X configured to 65W, an RTX 2060 or 2070, and up to 64GB of RAM.

    The result is not exactly svelte, but on the other hand it should be more than twice as fast as my current desktop.  Almost every option is configurable except the display, which is only 1080p.  Maxed out with a 3950X, RTX 2070, 64GB RAM and 8TB of SSD it comes to €4299.


  • Astrophysicists.  (The Guardian)


  • Speaking of AMD, we got our  first Threadripper 3960X server at my day job today.  Looks great, exactly as we specified.  Except for the tiny problem that I know how to verify if Linux is seeing ECC RAM...  And it isn't.

    Well, it's seeing an ECC-enabled CPU, an ECC-enabled motherboard, and 8 x 16GB ECC RAM modules, but it is not actually running with ECC enabled.

    The techs updated to the latest firmware, to no avail, and are going to try swapping to a different brand of memory.  If that fails we'll try Ubuntu 19.10 to see if we need a newer kernel to cope with the latest Threadripper CPU and chipset.

    And if that doesn't work, we'll swap it for an Epyc, which will be a bit slower but runs on a standard server motherboard that's been around for a couple of years now.


Videos of the Day



Don't remember if I posted this one before.  If I did, here it is again.  Chaosprojects being Chaosprojects.

I know I posted this one, because it introduced me to Saint Motel.




Disclaimer: You're just my type - you have a pulse and you are breathing.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:40 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 625 words, total size 5 kb.

1 I...I read that article in the Atlantic. 
I'm a little dumber now because of that, but not so dumb as to interpret an article stating that the crux of conservative legal thought has run its course and that conservatism must throw off the shackles of...conservatism, when published in THE ATLANTIC as anything but a concern troll.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Thursday, April 02 2020 01:14 AM (5iiQK)

2 "However, the academic realised the electronic part he had did the opposite – and would only complete a circuit when there was no magnetic field present.


"I accidentally invented a necklace that buzzes continuously unless you move your hand close to your face,” he said."


LOL!  Let me introduce you, my friend, to the concept of a NOT gate.  (I know it's probably not that simple.)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 02 2020 04:53 AM (Iwkd4)

3 I love the media uncritically reporting it as "while inventing an anti-coronavirus device", not "while screwing around with powerful magnets". Honestly, it's like the men who end up in the emergency room claiming that they were vacuuming naked, tripped, and accidentally got sucked into the hose...

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, April 02 2020 03:23 PM (ZlYZd)

4 I...what...the hell is that Atlantic article?  I don't even think it qualifies as a concern trolling.  As best I can tell the author is just starting from the axiom "Conservative legal thinking is actually the same as progressive legal thinking, despite what they say."  He then concludes that what needs to happen is for conservatives to just embrace the same legal goals as progressives with different window dressing.

Posted by: ReallyBored at Saturday, April 04 2020 07:51 AM (ijRNj)

5 I used to follow the author on Twitter.  He was a conservative, if not a conventional one.  Not obviously insane.  Now, though...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, April 04 2020 10:35 AM (PiXy!)

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




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