Saturday, May 01

Geek

Daily News Stuff 1 May 2021

B Ark Edition

Top Story

It was, of course, a descendent of these eccentric poets who invented this curious tale of impending doom which enabled the people of Golgafrincham to rid themselves of an entire useless third of their population. The other two-thirds, of course, stayed at home and lived full, rich, and happy lives until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.
— The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Radio Series, Episode Six, by Douglas Adams



A couple of years before Yoko Kanno made a huge splash with the soundtrack for Cowboy Bebop, she wrote the score for another very popular series, The Vision of Escaflowne.  The music is very different, but just as exceptional in its own way.  The series itself is also quite good, though I don't know how well it has stood the test of time.


Tech News

  • Intel's future Sapphire Rapids server CPUs could have as many as 80 cores.  (Tom's Hardware)

    This will be Intel's first chiplet-based CPU.  AMD started this trend in 2017, largely because they simply didn't have the budget to design and manufacture huge server chips with a then-unknown market acceptance.

    Instead, AMD's engineers added three high-speed interconnects to the standard desktop CPU, so that four eight-core parts could be linked together as a single 32-core part.

    It worked, and AMD now has server market share they haven't seen in 15 years, leaving Intel playing technical - if not sales - catchup.

    It's not clear when Sapphire Rapids will actually ship; the only official word so far is that Intel will be using these parts in a supercomputer for Argonne National Lab starting this year.


  • Taiwan has banned recruitment for semiconductor industry jobs located in West Taiwan.  (Tom's Hardware)

    The Chinese government is scrambling to build up its semiconductor industry, after being banned from purchasing both latest-generation chips and latest-generation manufacturing equipment by the Trump Administration.

    Despite the changeover in Washington DC those bans are still in effect.  China is five years behind Taiwan, and while that might not sound like much, five years ago Taiwan's semiconductor industry was a mess.  Back in 2016 TSMC was still mostly producing 28nm parts, because the 20nm process was a disaster and 16nm was still ramping up.

    This year they plan to start production of 3nm.

    So five years behind actually means ten times worse.


  • The unannounced Zen 3+ core for Ryzen 6000 may have been cancelled.  (WCCFTech)

    Or not. 

    It looks like there won't be a new desktop lineup from AMD this year, with Zen 4 expected to arrive in Q1 of 2022.  With manufacturing constrained and demand consistently outstripping supply across AMD's entire product range, it makes sense for them to focus on major new generations rather than trying to fill in gaps in the schedule to keep marketing happy.

    Intel will ship Alder Lake late this year, and that will introduce support for DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 - double the memory bandwidth and double the I/O bandwidth - but that doesn't look like a great part for desktop systems, since it's limited to 8 full-size cores where AMD already goes to 16.

    For laptops, possibly yes, since it also has up to 8 low-power cores, similar to the recent Arm based MacBook.  That could help deliver all-day battery life in a lightweight notebook.


  • Do not buy the PNY CS2130 SSD.  (Serve the Home)

    Instead of office chair, shipment contained live bobcat.  Would not buy again.


  • Pornhub received 500,000 DMCA takedown notices lat year - and issued nearly ten times that number.  (TorrentFreak)

    They all deserve each other, frankly.



Yoko Kanno Music Still Picture of the Day


The soundtrack for Vision of Escaflowne tends towards the classical rather than the bold jazz of Cowboy Bebop, but Kanno showed off her range here as well.  This track - Medicine Eater - only plays briefly as incidental music in two episodes, but it's one of my favourites.

This one, though, titled Dance of Curse, is the one anyone who's seen the series will recognise.



British Panda Accent Video of the Day



Either she's really English or she's much better at maintaining a consistent accent than Amelia from HoloEN.

As for her character, she's either a panda from the Panda Realm taken human form, or a tomato.  Possibly both.  It's complicated.



Disclaimer: Unless they got dropped on their head since then, anyway.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:51 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 817 words, total size 7 kb.

1 The comments on that Gizmodo article--as the article itself--are unsurprisingly wildly one-sided.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, May 02 2021 02:52 AM (eqaFC)

2 "The move depressingly aligned with similar internal policies at companies like Google and Amazon, who’ve also lost all semblance of moral superiority."

Just when I think I've seen the dumbest, least self-aware writing ever, some mentally-ill freak evolves into a more powerful form of stupid cluelessness than I've even imagined possible.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, May 02 2021 03:22 AM (obo9H)

3 I picked up the Escaflone soundtrack CD a long time ago. The track titles all showed up in Japanese, and I've never translated them.
Also, Brickmuppet is getting spammed pretty hard.

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, May 02 2021 06:17 AM (Ix1l6)

4 Escaflowne is one of those titles that I wished I could like more.  It never really clicked with me.  It never disliked it like some other titles, but it has never worked for me.


The Nuku-Nuku OVA, on the other hand, is an absolute gem, and I thoroughly enjoy it.  Strongly recommend.

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, May 02 2021 09:37 AM (4i7w0)

5 "Just when I think I've seen the dumbest, least self-aware writing ever"
The woke-istas will keep it up at least until they lose their own lame jobs and have to do real work.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, May 02 2021 12:59 PM (eqaFC)

6 And then discover that they're not worth $15 an hour.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, May 02 2021 01:31 PM (PiXy!)

7 Coming back to this, the more I look at that line "who’ve also lost all semblance of moral superiority" the more I think that we're living in the era of cargo cult language.  Sure, it sounds like English, and it even scans in a seemingly logical way, but when you try to bodge that "moral superiority" with the "also" and the previous nonsense about google and amazon, you're left with the profound sense that the person who wrote that was entirely sincere and also damnedly incapable of communicating with human beings.
It's also, at least to me, closely related to that UMinn poison-pill Linux commit letter: it's not that anyone should ever trust the people involved in that fiasco, but anyone who accepts that "open letter" they penned as a form of apology should be banned from committing to any open source project for life.  I mean, if you can read that garbage without tasting the bile rise in the back of your throat, I definitely don't want to use any software you've been allowed to work on, as even if you're not enthusiastically promulgating evil, you're certainly not capable of seeing what it is when it thrusts its meaty member down your throat and promises to tell you before it finishes.  Good night!

Posted by: normal at Sunday, May 02 2021 01:39 PM (obo9H)

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




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