Tuesday, March 09

Geek

Daily News Stuff 9 March 2021

Scone Of Stone Edition

Tech News

  • Turns out Lamy broke the TTT by hitting it accidentally with a loaf of bread.

    The player platform is made of glass so that (a) you can see what's going om and (b) monsters don't spawn there (they won't spawn on glass) and are instead forced to spawn in the catchment area.

    Problem with that is glass breaks if you hit it accidentally with anything in the game, and the TTT produces a constant stream of creepers.

    The PPP on the HoloEN server - their own version of the monster farm - is made of stone, and instead uses lots and lots of torches to force the monsters to spawn in the right place (monsters don't spawn in brightly lit areas).

    Don't think too hard about Minecraft logic.


  • Epyc Milan launches next Monday.  (AnandTech)

    I wonder if this is part of why Zen 3 has been scarce on desktops - that AMD has been preparing inventory of their server parts to ensure a successful rollout.  It's worth noting that while there's a months-long queue for the 5900X, for example, the 3900X is in stock and reasonably priced.  (And comes with a Wraith Prism cooler, which is actually pretty decent.)


  • Intel's Lunar Lake has shown up in Linux kernel patches.  (WCCFTech)

    This is probably 14th gen and won't be out for three years or more, and we currently know nothing about it.

    Alder Lake is supposed to replace Rocket Lake on the desktop before the end of the year, and Rocket Lake isn't even out yet.


  • Meanwhile, benchmarks have leaked of Intel's upcoming Ice Lake Xeons.  (WCCFTech)

    They seem to compete well against the 32 core Epyc Rome.

    Only problem is that (a) Epyc goes up to 64 cores and (b) Rome is set to be replaced by Milan in less than a week.


  • Google is really bad at UI design.  (The Universe of Discourse)

    Yes, those Google Meet buttons suck.


  • Like handing a live grenade to a bored monkey: A race condition meant GitHub sometimes logged people into other user's accounts.  (Bleeping Computer)

    How do you build a race condition into something as straightforward as a login?  What are you idiots doing over there?


  • A new algorithm for solving linear equations beats all previous attempts - by guessing the answer.  (Quanta)

    They've actually mathematically proven this approach to be more efficient.  Countless schoolchildren 1, maths teachers 0.


  • I ate the last of the chicken nuggets I got when they came back in stock.  Now they're out of stock again.

    My attempt at making my own didn't quite work because I tried to cook too much chicken at once in my mini-oven; by the time it was all cooked it was mostly overcooked.  I'll do half as much next time.


  • MIPS has dropped MIPS in favour of RISC-V.  (EE Journal)

    The article notes that the RISC-V design effort was headed by Dave Patterson, and MIPS, back in the day, by John Hennessy.  Together they wrote the book that - holy cow, that's expensive.


  • I was checking on the availability of graphics cards - though I'm really hoping to get through this year with my current systems - and at first it looked like Scorptec (one of my usual suppliers) had only one graphics card in stock, total.

    Turns out it was just that their "in stock only" filter works in an odd way if almost everything is out of stock, and you have to scroll the page for it to show anything.  In fact, both the 3090 and 6900 XT are available and ready to ship.  Horribly expensive, but available.


Not a Grain of Truth Videos of the Day

Someone in the Minds Hololive fan group posted that he swore they were all of them autistic.  I just want to say that there is not the slightest grain of truth to this.



Uh.




Disclaimer: An error occurred while processing this disclaimer.  Your credit card has not been charged.  Do not press the back button.  Do not reload the page.  Maybe take the rest of the week off.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:18 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 688 words, total size 6 kb.

1 textbook

Isn't that out of bounds for a graduate engineering text.  Several reasons for that, including funding for engineering study, that studying engineering/computer science to the level of being able to use an advanced text has significant sunk costs, and that textbooks are where publishers make the money they waste mismanaging the likes of fiction publishing.

autism

I dunno.  Anyone who can make a live2D performance work that well has a certain attention to detail.  But the level of thriving on human contact is a bit more than I would think to expect from an autism.  Comes to mind that I don't know much about male and female differences in autism.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, March 10 2021 12:36 AM (6y7dz)

2 On the autism thing - it takes a specific kind of personality to spend 31 hours straight trying to beat one particular boss in a game, and also to live-stream it to ten thousand people while maintaining a stream of entertaining chatter.  There's an aspect of the autism spectrum in there, but it doesn't really cover it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, March 10 2021 12:50 AM (PiXy!)

3 "I wonder if this is part of why Zen 3 has been scarce on desktops"
The single-CCD Zen 3s have been available more or less at list price, for several weeks at Micro Center.  Newegg's got the 5800X in stock at list, but are out of the 5600X, which is only being sold by a 3rd-party ripoff artist.
I just picked up a 5800X on Sunday. Dropped it into my existing system, and (accidentally) didn't even make it to the BIOS.  So far it works great.  It looks like up to 3 cores will run at 4850MHz, and all-core stress tests run at around 4500ZMHz.  By comparison, the outgoing 3600X generally only hit 4250 on a couple of cores; it could do a bit faster, but only momentarily, and the all-core was about 4100MHz.  So this is, while not a massive upgrade, a non-negligible one.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 10 2021 01:50 AM (eqaFC)

4 For some reason I have an old Patterson and Hennessy book. Bought it back when I was doing architectures in Linux, 1998 or so.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Wednesday, March 10 2021 08:41 AM (LZ7Bg)

5 Rick - yeah, the 5800X has been in stock for the past few weeks in Australia, and the 5600X has been in stock more often than not.  5950X is still hard to find and the 5900X impossible.  

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, March 10 2021 10:48 AM (PiXy!)

6 True on the 59x0s, yeah.  Micro Center gets, like, one, every once in a while.  I didn't mind--the 5800 was a bit more than I really needed, too, but I wanted that higher clock speed.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 10 2021 11:57 AM (eqaFC)

Hide Comments | Add Comment




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




56kb generated in CPU 0.0307, elapsed 1.1572 seconds.
58 queries taking 1.1471 seconds, 344 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.