Saturday, March 21

Geek

Daily News Stuff 21 March 2020

Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom Edition

Tech News

  • Twitter suspended Cory Doctorow for being Cory Doctorow.  (TechDirt)

    Good call for once, Twitter.


  • Google has cancelled their I/O conference which hasn't been interesting since 2013.  (Tech Crunch)

    I thought it had already been cancelled.


  • Free plague candy!  (WCCFTech)

    I mean games, yes totally games and not candy that will give you the plague.

    GOG has 27 free games.  Okay, they're either old titles or minor titles, but they're free.

    Steam has...  Oh.  Steam has demos.  Fuck Steam.


  • Build a complete 8-bit computer with just five chips.  (IEEE Spectrum)

    An Atmel ATmega1284, a USB interface, and four 7400-family ICs.  (Yes, I know.)

    The 1284 has 128KB of flash and 16KB RAM, which is enough for a basic 8-bit computer - and it is actually an 8-bit CPU.  It runs at 20MHz with single-cycle execution, though, so it blows any actual 8-bit computer of the era out of the water.  Well, with this design 75% of the CPU time is spent generating the video output, and it runs at 14MHz, but even so.

    It runs Forth, which unless the implementation is absolutely terrible will run rings around interpreted Basic.


  • The problem with Active Records. (Cal Paterson)

    And also with REST.

    When I was a little boy programmer my day job was spent working with what is now called the "Active Record pattern" except that this was a long time ago and it actually worked properly.


  • We're getting one of those shiny Threadripper servers at my day job.  That will at least give me the chance to try it out and see what it can do before I plunk my own money down.  PassMark says it's three times as fast as our biggest current server on multi-threaded tasks, and about 60% faster single-threaded than our fasted server for that.  

    If it works out well we plan to add a bunch more and move stuff out of our expensive cloud servers.


Disclaimer: It ain't what you do it's the way that you do it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:38 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 Doctorow is an asshole I've really soured on over the years, but I don't think that this counts as a good call. There are far worse people than Doctorow (who frequently makes good points) that I've defended for more loathesome things than stating an opinion.  The regs he's run afoul of seem to be terribly subjective. 

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sunday, March 22 2020 04:20 AM (5iiQK)

2 Akshually... I generally havent defended people for DOING asshollish things other than expressing an opinion. I've defended far greater assholes for expressing far worse opinions though. 

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sunday, March 22 2020 04:29 AM (5iiQK)

3 I stopped reading anything by Doctorow years ago, because he has no grasp of science, technology, or basic arithmetic, and his politics are simply odious. I'm pleased that he got a brief taste of what his kind does to others every day, but quite sure he won't learn anything from the experience.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, March 22 2020 07:02 AM (ZlYZd)

4 I just got a brief suspension for calling people overdosing on chloroquine morons.  Twitter's rules for suspensions are absurd, but enforcing them equally across the political spectrum so that everyone hates them is the only way that will ever change.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 22 2020 03:42 PM (PiXy!)

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




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