Monday, August 12

Geek

Daily News Stuff 11 August 2019

One Meg Good Two Megs Bad Edition

Tech News

  • Cisco to Cisco customers: You don't own nothin'.  (iFixit)

    Cisco software licenses are now bound to the original purchaser, not to the hardware.  And devices will phone home to check that their current owner has the appropriate license.

    This takes second-hand Cisco gear from being a highly-desirable commodity for people building home networks to basically rack-mount rust.

  • One Law for Big and Small Alike, which prohibits you from saying naughty words if you have fewer than a million followers.  (Ars Technica)

    YouTube moderators, who couldn't tell which side of their bread was buttered with a gas chromatograph and an easy-print copy of the Chemical Rubber Company's Buttered Bread Handbook, were shocked and appalled that a hugely popular channel wasn't immediately and permanently banned for tasering a dead rat.

    Also, it appears that tasering a dead rat is against YouTube's community guidelines, so there goes my new channel before it even got started.

  • Apple is now the fourth largest smartphone maker by volume.  (Yahoo News)

    Samsung, Huawei, Oppo, then Apple.

    Profits are a different story; while Apple has been weakening on that front as well they are still the industry profit leader by a significant margin.

  • P++ is a strongly-typed offshoot of PHP for people who can't grasp the concept of DON'T USE PHP YOU IDIOTS.  (PHP.net)

  • SQLite can be used as an attack vector  (squints) if you have permission to overwrite another app's database files.  (ZDNet)

    So if you already have the key, you can open the door.  It's a sneaky vector to make a security hole persistent, but not a security hole in itself.


Retrocomputing Journal

I'm increasingly thinking that the solution for the limitations of the 100-pin version of the H750 is just to use two of them.  Everything else is more expensive or more complicated, and often both.

This means I can allocate 512K to user code on one chip, and 512K to graphics on the other.  And that means I can generate the native resolution of 960x540 in 256 colours with neither hardware nor software hacks.  The other (smaller) memory banks can be assigned to audio, sprites, fonts, and the operating system (which doesn't require much space at all).

The link between the two chips will be 50Mbps SPI, which is dreadfully slow by the standards of modern internal buses, but for comparison is more than enough to stream 4K video.  Not that this hardware can get anywhere near 4K video.

In qty 25, it's now about A$30 for parts and A$20 for PCB printing, assembly, and shipping.*  (Not counting shipping parts to China for the assembly.)  For comparison, the case I like is A$70, and the custom keyboard I want is A$230, though those are qty 1.

* Oops, not quite right.  Have to recalculate that again, will probably need a few more units to make that price break.


Video of the Day





Disclaimer: Solar roadways
Making solar roadways
Took some solar
And I put it in a roadway.
Solar roadways
Making solar roadways
Solar road-ways...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:06 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 516 words, total size 5 kb.

1 Solar bridge:  Who could've known that using glass as a flooring material would turn out to be a bad idea?!

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, August 12 2019 03:22 AM (Iwkd4)

2 I am stunned and saddened by the absence of Flying Witch in that AMV.  There was a whole eight-minute-long stretch of one episode about nothing but making pancakes.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Monday, August 12 2019 02:44 PM (ssz1E)

3 I checked and the video did come out after Flying Witch aired.  This is inexcusable.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, August 12 2019 11:48 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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