Sunday, November 01

Geek

Daily News Stuff 1 November 2020

Minecart Edition

Tech News

  • Wait, when did those get added to Terraria?


  • Paging Big Hero 6.  (IEEE Spectrum)

    Swarms of tiny self-assembling robots.  What could possibly go wrong?


  • Intel's DG1 GPU card is coming to the desktop.  (AnandTech)

    It's currently only for laptops and sold bundled with Intel CPUs, and the card will also be OEM-only.  I'm not sure who exactly would want it, though it should support QuickSync for video transcoding.


  • There were zero new local cases of Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague in Australia yesterday.  (WuhanBatSoupDeathPlagueData)

    People in Melbourne are now able to freely travel...  A maximum of 25km.

    A colleague had to co-ordinate with her parents to meet half-way for lunch.

    Oh, and the Melbourne Cup is on Tuesday.  This year it will be virtual.  Robot horses or something.


One Million Yubis

Planning to get a new computer next year. Rough specs - subject to a lot of change.
  • Ryzen 5900X
  • Radeon 6800 XT
  • ASRock X570 Taichi
  • 128GB RAM
  • 3TB NVMe RAID-0
  • 4TB SATA SSD RAID-0
  • Maybe a 14TB hard disk
  • 3 x 4K monitors

That's a really high spec, but I want to put it under my desk and then not touch it for the next four years. So I'm strongly considering not having an internal hard drive at all, because the iron rule of computing is that hard drives fail.

I already have three 4K monitors - the two Dell desktops have HDMI input, and I have a Samsung 4K TN monitor - so I can replace the monitors at any time, not necessarily when I buy the system.  As long as my video card has two HDMI outputs, anyway.

And I can buy the SSDs now and put them in the Dells until I'm ready to do the rest of it.  Can't do that with memory unfortunately, since the Dells use SO-DIMMs.

It will be named Korone, to honor the doggo who just hit a million subscribers.

Honestly I could halve everything and still be pretty happy, but I am going to be running VMs, databases, cryptocurrency nodes, and all sorts of other crap on it, and expecting it to run games smoothly at the same time, so it needs to be overkill. 

Or...  I could just buy two smaller systems.  I guess.

Update: Thinking about it, two systems makes more sense.  One Windows and one Linux.  Probably just with the 5600X and a 6700 XT or whatever they come up with on the Windows system.

Let's see what reasonably-priced motherboards are available with faster than 1Gb Ethernet...  Well, if I wanted to stick with ASRock, the answer is none.  Better off getting a couple of 10Gb cards rather than paying nearly as much to upgrade to a motherboard with integrated 2.5Gb.


Not At All Tech News




Terraria Video of the Day



Since when was there a mini map? Since when were there minecarts? Okay, yes, it's been a while.

Coco is eager to get a multi-player server set up and drag the other girls into this. I'd love to see them battling the various bosses together, because it would be complete chaos. They can't even ride a virtual roller coaster without multiple fatalities.

Update: Someone clipped and translated yesterday's Death Coaster insanity.  This is just a few of the highlights, I counted at least six fatal falls while I was watching.





Picture of the Day

Three of the HoloEN girls were streaming Left4Dead, a four-player game.  Calli had a recording session and Kiara had a collab with one of the HoloJP members, I think.

Since leaving a slot open would allow random people to join the game, the HoloEN manager joined in - and turned out to be the MVP.  Fans quickly dubbed her Enma (EN manager).

http://ai.mee.nu/images/EnMa-San.png

Enma is also the Buddhist god of the dead, so it fits perfectly into the Holomyth theme.



Disclaimer: She is Calli's boss, after all.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:13 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 652 words, total size 6 kb.

1 >hard drives die I just had a (two-year-old) 970evo ssd go "blerk" and completely disappear off the bus.  If I put in in a USB enclosure, it takes about 5 minutes to enumerate, and it shows up as a 0GB drive with a sector size of 0b, and all the id strings are also easy to read zeros.  I guess I could put it in a RAID-0 using a stripe size of zero and see how it performs.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, November 01 2020 11:52 PM (obo9H)

2 Yeah, we had a high-end PCIe MLC drive do exactly that at work.  One moment the server was chugging along, next moment BIOS didn't recognise it as a device.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, November 02 2020 12:05 AM (PiXy!)

3 It's been a long time since I've put anything other than an ASUS motherboard into a PC I build, but that ASRock sure looks nice.
When I bought my current 27" 4K monitor, I built an SLI computer to drive it, GTX 970's if I recall. Do you really think a single card can usefully drive THREE 4K monitors?

Posted by: David at Monday, November 02 2020 05:03 PM (jdGUg)

4 The multiple 4K monitor setup is for work - I have two 4K screens right now and it's not enough.

If I end up playing games across multiple screens I'll be fine dropping back to 1080p for that.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, November 02 2020 08:03 PM (PiXy!)

5 > Swarms of tiny self-assembling robots. What could possibly go wrong?
I just lost a game of Stellaris by releasing a classic gray goo, so this is just the kind of thing I want to see people working toward.

Posted by: Jay at Tuesday, November 03 2020 05:07 AM (0jVI9)

6 Having not played Stellaris, I don't know what the result is.  Did you lose because the goo ate you first?

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 03 2020 06:27 AM (eqaFC)

7 I'm not familiar with Stellaris, but if I were designing a game with "grey goo" as a possibility, I would definitely make that a universal losing condition.  (Assuming we're talking about the same stuff.)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, November 03 2020 12:33 PM (obo9H)

8 Universal Paperclips.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, November 03 2020 12:54 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment




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




56kb generated in CPU 0.0229, elapsed 0.4906 seconds.
58 queries taking 0.4786 seconds, 346 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.