Saturday, January 22

Geek

Daily News Stuff 22 January 2022

This Is Hololive Edition

Top Story

  • Intel is spending $20 billion on a new manufacturing facility in Ohio.  (AnandTech)

    The new facility will initially include two factories on 1000 acres, with room to expand to eight factories.

    These won't come online until 2025, so they're not going to help you buy that video card you want, but they are in addition to the $20 billion expansion Intel already has under way in Arizona, $3.5 billion in New Mexico, $3 billion in Oregon, and $7 billion in Malaysia.

    Almost as if chip making was big business these days.


  • Weekends are question and answer time.  Drop your questions in the comments today and I'll attempt to answer them tomorrow.  If you left a question during the week I'll try to answer those too but I might miss seeing some of them.


Tech News

  • Google's inclusive language police are working tirelessly to prevent offense to inanimate objects.  (Wall Street Journal)

    Not a surprise to see stories like this; we all know the lunatics have taken over the asylum at Google.  Bit of a surprise to see the story being written by eminent theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss.


  • Athletes competing in the 2022 Winter Olympics should keep their mouths shut if they want to get out of China alive.  (South China Morning Post)

    Interesting to see this article not quite directly accusing the Chinese government of genocide but liberally citing others who do level those accusations.  The SCMP is owned by the Alibaba Group, which is not exactly on cordial terms with the Xi dictatorship.

    It also puts he boot squarely into the International Olympic Committee, which has entirely earned this kicking.


  • The Raden 6500 XT is a crap desktop graphics card because AMD never intended it to be a desktop graphics card.  (Hot Hardware)

    The design choices are focused on reducing power consumption, not cost, for a laptop graphics solution.  And it works fine...  Works acceptably in that scenario.

    So for example it only has 4 lanes of PCIe.  That's fine - acceptable - if you have PCIe 4, but slows things down significantly in older systems with PCIe 3.  But in laptops that's irrelevant, because nobody is going to produce a laptop with a four year old CPU and the latest graphics chip.

    The only reason it's shown up on the desktop at all is the ongoing shortage of graphics cards - better to have something out there than nothing at all.

    That explains all the shortcomings of the card - the limited I/O and memory bandwidth, the missing video compression codecs, the lack of VRAM - they grabbed some spare mobile chips to try to keep up with desktop demand.

    It's still a bad card and you shouldn't buy one, but it's not malice aforethought.


Party Like It's 1980-ish Video of the Day





Disclaimer: Tried to start it up, tried to start it up but it don't pop.  It's been running hot, think the carburetor might be shot.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:56 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 502 words, total size 4 kb.

1 I have an older Apple Mac Mini (bought in 2015, IIRC) with an Intel Core I5 1.4 GHz processor, 4 GB of 1600 MHz DDR3 Ram, and an Intel HD Graphics 5000 graphics processor.  The Mac is still running the OS it came with from the factory (OS X El Capitan v10.11.6).  I use it almost exclusively for Web surfing, and I'm finding the browser (Safari v11.1.2) is starting to hiccup from time to time, especially if I have lots of tabs open with Youtube videos or other resource hogs (e.g. tabs closing on their own, prolonged freezes with the Spinning Beach-Ball of Doom).
What can I do to upgrade/fix the OS and browser so that things run more reliably? In particular, what are the latest versions of OS X and Safari I can install that (a) are still available, (b) will run on my Mac, and (c) have as few of Apple's more Orwellian innovations as possible? Would you recommend a different browser? Or, to turn an old phrase on it's head, should I just buy a PC?

Posted by: Peter the Not-so-Great at Sunday, January 23 2022 05:58 AM (yCp8E)

2 Where did the code formatting "rule" for brace bracket indentation come from? I hate it and wont use it.

How is:

if (cond) {
stuff;
}

more readable than

if (cond)
   {
   stuff
   }

Why is there often a semi-colon after "stuff" in "properly formatted" code when the language does not require it?

Why is there sometimes even a completely useless semicolon excrescence after a closing brace bracket? Is there any language that requires that?

Why are there supposed to be spaces around operators like " <= "?

Goddamn prolix. When I coded for a living I had to do some of that shite, but now I write my code to please me.

But I still feel strongly about it.

I hope my indentations show up properly in the comment. I tried to post this at ace which declared it spam.

Posted by: Fred Z at Sunday, January 23 2022 07:12 AM (6jku8)

3 "Why is there often a semi-colon after "stuff" in "properly formatted" code when the language does not require it?"


Because Javascript can sometimes do unexpected things without it.

"Why are there supposed to be spaces around operators like " <= "?"

It's easier to read.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 23 2022 12:18 PM (Z0GF0)

4 Fred, the K&R brace style is more readable because more code fits onto your 80x24 CRT terminal, of course. All that fancy whitespace is expensive. :-)

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, January 24 2022 01:59 AM (rIzT3)

5 People don't know any longer just how constrained computers were.  I read something a few days ago--I think it was on Hackaday, but maybe even here--about someone writing a parallel decoder for PNG files and running into pitfalls.   There was a comment about being surprised that the data wasn't really stored in a way that was amenable to parallel compression/decompression.  Understandable, but it misses the fact that nobody was using multicore processors in the mid 90s when the spec was created.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, January 24 2022 02:38 AM (Z0GF0)

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




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