• Osiris Rex has landed safely on Bennu.  (New Atlas)
  
  It has collected a two ounce sample of the asteroid's surface and will now fly back to Earth with it - landing in Utah in September 2023.
  
  Because, apparently.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Osiris Rex, Tom Lehrer is releasing all his lyrics into the public domain.  (Tom Lehrer Songs)
  
  But still in all you have to admit
  That he loved his mother.
  
  
  
• Gigabyte has released two new AMD-based Brix Pro models.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They have a great selection of ports, including dual Gigabit Ethernet and four HDMI outputs, and two M.2 slots and a 2.5" drive bay.
  
  And for some reason a three-year-old first generation Ryzen Embedded APU.

• TrueNAS 12 is out.  (Serve the Home)
  
  With this release there is no more FreeNAS; in its place is TrueNAS Core.  I'm not sure if there are any differences in the platform at all; I think it's just a branding change, because FreeNAS and TrueNAS sounded like two different and competing products.

Tom Lehrer Music Video - Well, Music Still Photo Anyway - of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, October 22 2020 12:55 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Home Swap at Tuesday, October 27 2020 02:23 PM (ZfErH)

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• Disabled the dedicated graphics on New Spare Laptop and now it's behaving itself.  Idle Champions is running just fine, which was the goal after all.
  
  Looks like the Radeon GPU can push power draw above what the charger can deliver (only 65W) at least briefly.  If that happens when the battery is literally at zero charge, splat.  Fortunately lets you choose when to use Intel vs. AMD graphics, and you can easily lock it in power-saving mode where the GPU is disabled entirely.
  
  Going to pop it open next weekend and see if disconnecting the battery really does fix this issue.
  
  Update: And splat.  That is one garbage power supply they have there.
  
  
  
• Intel has sold off its entire flash memory business to SK Hynix for around $9 billion.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel was a key early player but lately hasn't been much of anything.
  
  
  
• Benchmarks of what may be AMD's Epyc Milan may indicate that it may match the best Xeon CPUs in single-threaded performance.  (WCCFTech)
  
  While mopping the floor with Xeon in multi-threaded, of course.
  
  
  
• Arturo is a language inspired by REBOL and written in Nim.  (GitHub)
  
  Well, okay.
  
  
  
• What's new in Windows 20H2?  Not much, thank goodness.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Maybe they could make it so that it actually notices that your battery isn't charging?
  
  
  
• Vtuber science babe something something.
  
  
  
  
  

Posted by: Eric SWG at Tuesday, October 20 2020 08:19 PM (q0/CS)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, October 20 2020 08:46 PM (PiXy!)

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• New Spare Laptop has been deployed and is currently installing six months worth of software updates.
  
  Update: Where did all my disk space go?  Wait, VirtualBox is using how much?  Well, those can all go for a start.
  
  Update 2: Oh joy, a Windows Update boot loop.
  
  Update 3: Okay, Windows is updated now.  But it turns out that this laptop won't charge either.  Runs fine plugged in until you do something that draws extra current like, oh, running Idle Champions, at which point it drops dead.
  
  Update 4: That might be a software issue.  (CNet)
  
  But I'll have to open up the laptop and disconnect the battery to fix it.  Ugh.
  
  Hmm.  At some point I reinstalled Windows on this system and scrubbed it of all the Dell-specific drivers and stuff.  Might be worth reinstalling those.
  
  Update 5: BIOS reports the battery is fine, so it is a driver issue.  Well, that can be fixed, one way or another.
  
  Update 6: "This battery charging is temporarily disable."
  
  Update 7: There's apparently a workaround using advanced charging schedules.  Why they even exist I don't know, but worth a shot.
  
  Update 8: Nope.  Time to buy a new battery from some random seller on Amazon, I guess.  I can choose from Ding brand or Binger, or Amanda, or....  The reviews say remove your battery, leave it for two minutes, then try again.  Well, worth a shot.
  
  
  
• The Bolsheviks at Google and Facebook are engaged in a war with the Mensheviks at the ABC.  (The Guardian)
  
  (Australia's ABC, that is.)
  
  The ACCC has mandated that social networks pay news organisations for the right to link to them.  Google and Facebook have said they will simply disable the ability to link to news articles.
  
  The ABC says that hey, it could run a social network.
  
  The only upside to the nightmare that would be a government-run social network is that it would collapse instantly because the ABC couldn't manage a piss-up in a brewery.
  
  
  
• Down the rabbit hole: I'm a paid member of Amelia Watson's channel now.  On the other hand, it works out to something like ten cents per hour of entertainment given how much she streams.
  
  I don't often get to catch the live streams because I'm usually working on something at the same time and need to be able to pause, and they don't allow that on their livestreams.
  
  I've watched a couple of dozen hours of Hololive and politics hasn't been mentioned even once.  It's infinitely better value than Netflix for that reason alone.
  
  
  
• The Raspberry Pi 4 Compute Module is a Raspberry Pi 4 compute module.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They've dropped the SO-DIMM form factor for some reason.  That's a shame - it breaks backwards compatibility with early compute modules and replaces a standard connector with a custom one.
  
  On the upside, it has one PCIe 2.0 lane.
  
  
  
• Asus looks to be preparing an Intel laptop with Intel graphics.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Nobody knows why, but the answer is probably spelled "money".
  
  
  
• AMD skipped Ryzen 4000 on the desktop because the numbering had become confusing.  And then: The Ryzen 5600U and 5800U will be Zen 3; the 5500U and 5700U will be Zen 2 unless they won't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This will still be a significant upgrade, because the 5700U will be 8 cores / 16 threads, where the 4700U is 8 cores / 8 threads.  So each model should be 20-25% faster than its predecessor.
  
  
  
• There will be four editions of the Radeon 6900 unless there are five, or three, or some other number.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Rumours suggest a 6900 XE (or XLE), a 6900 XL, a 6900 XT, and a 6900 XTX, ranging from 64 to 80 cores.
  
  We'll know soon - AMD's Radeon event is on the 28th.
  
  
  
• The Arm64 memory architecture supports address tagging.  (LWN)
  
  I didn't know that.  Since nobody actually had 16 exabytes of RAM, the architecture only uses 48 bits for physical addresses, and four bits of the virtual address can be used as a data type field.
  
  
  
• Do not drink the cursed Elixir.  (GitHub)
  
  
  
• Unlocking God Mode in Windows 10.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  You just need 64 blocks of Crying Obsidian and two Diamond Anvils.
  
  Or, alternately, log in with admin privileges and create a folder named GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}.
  
  It will give you a version of the Control Panel with every single configuration and management option available.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 20 2020 03:59 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, October 20 2020 06:29 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 20 2020 08:37 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, October 20 2020 09:23 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 20 2020 11:15 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, October 20 2020 12:25 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 20 2020 01:15 PM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, October 20 2020 04:46 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rock C at Wednesday, October 21 2020 12:07 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 21 2020 04:24 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 21 2020 10:09 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, October 21 2020 11:04 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 21 2020 12:28 PM (eqaFC)

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• It's definitely a loose connection.  Spare Laptop charged to 57% after being left alone for a while.  I used it for half an hour, then switched the settings so that closing the lid would put it into sleep mode, and left to do other things.
  
  Came back and it was dead as a doornail.
  
  Three hours later I poked it again, and it booted up and showed that it was at 86%, but not charging.  Fiddled with the power connecter and it started charging again.
  
  Okay.  Still replacing you, though, Spare Laptop.
  
  
  
• My 1.2TB of microSD cards arrived, so I can populate my mobile devices, for when I go out, which I don't do, or into the office, which I also don't do.
  
  Update: Old Spare Laptop and New Spare Laptop both already have 200GB cards as it turns out.  So one of these goes in Index, one in Railgun, and the other one I'll keep for my next phone - I'll probably get an Oppo A52 or A91.
  
  
  
• The New York Post's Twitter account is still locked.  (Fox Business)
  
  Twitter is apparently insisting that the Post delete several tweets.  The Post is, understandingly, telling Twitter to go fuck itself with a piledriver and twelve feet of curare-tipped wrought-iron fence and no lubricant.
  
  
  
• I am shocked, shocked, to find partisan corruption going on in this social network.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Nobody knows what this is.  (AliExpress)
  
  Well, everyone knows what it says it is - a small motherboard with an embedded AMD A9-9820 CPU.  Only problem is that AMD never produced an A9-9820.  (ExtremeTech)
  
  Speculation is that these are failed Xbox One S dies.  At $125 just for the board, most people would be better off getting the new and far more powerful Xbox Series S, but it is a curiosity.  Other Linus mentioned that he had already ordered one for testing.
  
  
  
• The Argon One M.2 gets more out of your Raspberry Pi 4.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a bit larger than the average Raspberry Pi case, but it does add a fan, full size HDMI ports, and a (SATA) M.2 slot.
  
  
  
• Building a new PC and want something faster than Gigabit Ethernet?  The Inventec SmartNIC C5020X has dual 50GbE ports.  (Serve the Home)
  
  And an FPGA, 32GB of DDR4 RAM, and a Xeon-D processor.
  
  That should do the trick.
  
  
  
• There are no signs at all that this will become a gigantic clusterfuck.  (Politico.eu)
  
  Twenty-five European governments have pledged a total of €10 billion to build an alternative to AWS.
  
  I'll get the popcorn.
  
  
  
• Friends don't let friends use Node.  (ZDNet)
  
  Just the latest list of malware that had been sitting in NPM undetected for (checks notes) two years.
  
  
  
• Bay Area politicians are panicking over a recent suggestion that tech workers be required to work from home three days a week.  (MSN)
  
  The problem, they suggest, is that if required to work from home, the workers could just as easily work from home somewhere that isn't an overpriced overtaxed socialist shithole.
  
  They are right.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, October 19 2020 01:19 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, October 19 2020 03:15 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Monday, October 19 2020 05:36 AM (obo9H)

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• The new Ryzen 5950X scores pretty well on benchmarks, particularly when overclocked to 6GHz.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Someone seems to have an advance sample and a flask of liquid nitrogen.
  
  
  
• Atlassian has an announcement for small to medium customers running their software on-premises: Drop dead.  (Atlassian)
  
  They did have a program where you could get licenses for small teams for as little as $10 per year.  Now they're cancelling everything short of enterprise-scale licenses.  And doubling prices for those.
  
  
  
• GitLab 13.4 is out.  (GitLab)
  
  It's increasing an Atlassian replacement and not just a Git server.  It does require a lot more resources than it once did.  GitLab suggests a minimum of 4GB of RAM for up to 500 users, but in my experience you need just a wee bit more than that.
  
  
  

• Twitter fell down.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
  
  
  
  
• So did Slack.  (Slack)
  
  Slack is still a thing, right?
  
  
  
• Twitter and Facebook crossed a line.  (The Intercept)
  
  Glenn Greenwald - yes, that Glenn Greenwald - writes a thorough, incisive, and scathing analysis of the Orwellian events of the last 48 hours.
  
  Also this:
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Matt Taibbi - another lefty journalist who can actually report straight news some of the time - shuts down a Huntergate Truther:
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Twitter announced changes to its "hacked materials" policy after realising they'd just banned journalism.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Nim 1.4 is out.  (Nim-lang)
  
  Looks like mostly improvements to the standard library, plus a new garbage collector that handles circular references properly.
  
  
  
• A look a the Crucial P5 SSD.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is a mid-range TLC PCIe 3.0 device, which in 2020 means that it can transfer 3.4GB per second.  That puts it about 40% ahead of the WD Blue SN550, but on the other hand it's 50% more expensive.
  
  
  
• Looks like Spare Laptop has a loose connection somewhere in the power circuit; it charges about 1% per hour if I'm lucky.
  
  Everything is backed up now, since it has soldered-in storage and if it stops charging completely there is no way for me to recover it.  Not that it had much on it - it has just 64GB of internal storage and I have a 64TB Synology farm in the spare bedroom.
  
  Looks like it will be getting an upgrade this weekend - from an old-model Atom with 4GB RAM, 64GB of storage, and a 1366x768 TN display, to a Core i5, dedicated Radeon graphics, 16GB RAM, 4GB VRAM, 1TB of SSD, and a 4k IPS touchscreen.
  
  Which just happen to be the precise specs of my work laptop.  Since I work entirely from home now, and I have the HP Spectre for when we do start having in-person sessions again, I might as well use the hardware I already have.
  
  I did have other laptops still working, and with better specs than Spare Laptop, but I handed them down to my nephews.
  
  Only catch - Spare Laptop had the Four Essential keys.  Work Laptop, which cost me roughly six times as much, does not.
  
  
  
• Networking is the one odd corner of computing where you can simply plunk down cash and buy speed.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Gigabit Ethernet is still the standard for end users, but if you want a four port 100GbE card, they are readily available.
  
  This Silcom SnartNIC is probably not the cheapest option, since it also includes a high-end Stratix 10 DX FPGA, 8GB of HBM RAM, and 32GB of DDR4.
  
  
  
• Amazon Women With iPhones on the Moon.  (UPI)
  
  NASA has awarded Nokia a contract to provide cell phone service on the Moon.
  
  
  
• It is, after all, the 21st century.  (BBC News)
  
  This is the second time recently that a person has been spotted flying a jetpack at an altitude of a mile over Los Angeles.
  
  
  
  

• I mostly try to steer Daily News Stuff clear of politics - except when I'm suspended on Twitter and have no primary outlet for such stuff.  But in the last twenty-four hours, politics and tech news have collided like a runaway sewage truck ploughing through a special-needs kindergarten.
  
  It was not pretty.
  
  
  
• The original story was this: Hunter Biden, son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, left a computer containing damaging videos and incriminating emails with a laptop repair store and then forgot to go back and pick it up.  (New York Post)
  
  After a period of some months the store owner checked the contents of the laptop and notified the FBI, who subpoenaed the owner and seized the device, and are now refusing to speak as to whether or not there is an investigation. 
  
  However, the store owner first copied the data; whether that was as a legitimate part of the repair procedure or for more prurient than prudent reasons is unspecified.
  
  In any case, the data eventually passed to Rudy Giuliani, and thence the the New York Post, which acted like a newspaper and reported on the story.
  
  And then all hell broke loose.
  
  
  
• Twitter locked the Post's account.  (New York Post)
  
  Twitter blocked users from tweeting the article.  Twitter blocked users from retweeting tweets about the article.  Twitter suspended accounts of journalists discussing the story.  (Twitter)  Twitter suspended the account of White House Presss Secretary Kayleigh McEnany.  (New York Post)  Twitter blocked the House Judiciary Committee.  (Twitchy)
  
  Hours later, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey apologised for doing this without providing an explanation.  He did not apologise in any way for the actions themselves - and the Post's Twitter account is still locked at time of writing.  He only apologised for not providing a reason why all this censorship was taking place.
  
  And then a reason was provided: Twitter will not permit the circulation of news stories using information provided without authorisation.
  
  
  
• Which is a flaming pile of bullshit because that excludes everything but press releases and the weather.
  
  
  
• The Biden campaign is now claiming that Twitter's censorship of the story is evidence that it is false, which is even more lame than their earlier assertion that there was no meeting between Joe Biden and the named Burisma executive recorded in the VP's official schedule.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Facebook followed Twitter's shining example, refusing to allow users to link to the article until their fact checkers had had their way with it.  (The American Spectator)
  
  
  
  
  This restriction appears to still be in place.
  
  
  
• Don't expect an answer.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Sums it up nicely.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• More reporting at Victory Girls.
  
  
  
• Webster's altered their online dictionary to support a far-left attack on Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett.  (The Post Millennial)
  
  A day ago, that was big news.
  
  
  
• Oh, and the New York Times has come out against the First Amendment.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• The first room-temperature superconductor has been discovered.  (Science News)
  
  Room temperature, that is, assuming that it's a bright cold day in April and you've left your windows open and also that you're at the bottom on an ocean fifteen thousand miles deep.
  
  Room temperature, yes, but at over two million atmospheres of pressure.
  
  
  
• Dell has an Epyc server with 160 PCIe 4.0 lanes.  (Serve the Home)
  
  All direct from the two CPUs.  This is achieved by cutting the link between the CPUs from 64 lanes to 48, which is viable because the speed of those lanes has doubled over first generation Epyc.
  
  
  
• My spare laptop must have read this blog because apparently it has forgotten that when plugged in to the charger, the desired result is, well, charging.  It seems to have bottomed out at 20% and it's currently still working, but I've backed up all my files just in case.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 16 2020 06:29 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 16 2020 06:33 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 16 2020 06:44 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, October 16 2020 12:28 PM (vNkOW)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, October 17 2020 01:32 AM (PiXy!)

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• Well, I guess I have Amazon Prime now.  The only thing I bought was three of those 400GB Sandisk microSD cards.  Come to think of it, that's basically all I ever buy during these big Amazon sales.
  
  I would still like to get some of Sandisk's 1TB microSD cards, to pair with the 1TB SSDs in my two laptops, but they still cost a fortune. The 400GB model at $60 is far better value.
  
  They did have a sale on the Western Digital Blue SN550 1TB model, but it was only about 10% off and shipped from Amazon UK, so I passed on that.
  
  

• I really wanted the 2TB model, but I couldn't find any sales on that one.
  
  Turns out that's because there is no Western Digital Blue SN550 2TB model.  What I was looking at before was the older Western Digital Blue, which was an M.2 SATA drive.  Which would probably work fine but I'm going to pass on that too.
  
  
  
• I looked at some phones as well, but there weren't any amazing specials to be had.  The Oppo A52 looked good, but when I checked it was basically at retail price.
  
  
  
• Apple announced the iPhone 12, now available in sizes.  (AnandTech)
  
  All four of the new models now has at least a 1080p screen.  Since Apple has been retinising everything for years, it surprised me that this was supposed to be new, but I checked and the regular iPhone 11 had a display resolution of 1792x828.
  
  
  
• A full review of the Surface Laptop Go.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Quick precis: Meh.
  
  
  
• Krita 4.4 is out.  (Krita)
  
  I saw the announcement and realised that I once knew what Krita was but that knowledge had gone to Tumbolia.  So I checked and it's an open source paint program for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
  
  
  
• PC sales rose 8% in Q3.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  People keep saying that you can do everything you need on an iPad or even a phone, but those people don't have jobs.  When work-from-home kicked in and people needed to work from home, they bought PCs.
  
  
  
• Speaking of imaginary early 80's computers, I previously said that there was no way to feed pixel data from the cartridge port to the video processor fast enough to put a graphics upgrade into a cartridge.
  
  I was wrong.
  
  I was looking at this because some NES and SNES cartridges had hardware on them - not just ROM chips - to provide new game features, and wanted to make that possible in the emulator.
  
  Now, the hardware as specified can't write a video stream to RAM in real time, but if we allow for the shared memory bus to be configured as a streaming pixel input, it can work as just another playfield that appears out of nowhere, and the graphics from the regular video controller can be an overlay or a backdrop to whatever the cartridge is doing.
  
  That would even (in theory) extend to a second-generation graphics card with faster nibble-mode memory.
  
  All it needs is one or two more of those 74LS861 bus transceivers to isolate the CPU with shared memory, where before I had only specified them to isolate the CPU from shared memory.  (One or two depending on whether we need the cartridge hardware to be able to drive the address bus as well.)
  
  I originally considered adding a dedicated pixel port to the imaginary video chip, but that felt like I was adding too much stuff in.  This version has appropriate tradeoffs; while the video controller is receiving the pixel stream from the cartridge, it is unable to access shared memory at all.
  
  
  
• Let's see what's on Prime Video.  Movies we think you'll like....  Those are all garbage, Amazon.  TV....  Well, you have all twelve seasons of Bones.  That might be worth a look.  And all one season of The Dresden Files.
  
  How about anime?  Uh.  Okay, that's clearly a question I should not have asked.  The list is short and mostly third-rate, though they have The Great Passage which I rather like and no-one watched.
  
  
  
  
  
• Netflix is run by morons.  (Wired)
  
  "Second-order effects?  What are those?"
  
  It's the Google Graveyard of television.
  
  
  
• There are basically no good laptops under A$1000.  There are plenty of laptops under A$1000, but they all have major issues - either they're crippled with Atom processors and soldered-in memory and storage, or they have 720p TN displays.
  
  My current spare laptop ticks all those boxes with regards to flaws, but I paid about A$230 for it so I don't care too much.  Except when I want to run Idle Champions on it and it gets overloaded to a point that the trackpad stops working.  (It's an Atom, and not one of the good Atoms.  Technetium or something problematic like that.)
  
  This Acer Aspire A5 appears to be an exception.  (AmazonAU)
  
  It's not all that cheap, and it's last year's Ryzen and the low-end model at that, but it is still a Ryzen.  1080p IPS display, check.  Upgradeable memory and storage, check.  It includes 128GB of NVMe storage and an empty 2.5" bay, and one 4GB DIMM installed, meaning you can upgrade it without throwing anything away, which is great when you already have spare memory modules and 2.5" drives just lying around.
  
  HDMI, USB 3, wired Ethernet, micro....  No microSD?  Poo.
  
  The current model is better in almost every way - it has a Ryzen 4700U, close to the top of the line, 8GB RAM, 512GB of NVMe SSD - but it also costs twice as much.  Which isn't ideal when your list of requirements is basically "1080p and can run Idle Champions without freezing up".
  
  
  
• Apropos of nothing, Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms is really, really badly optimised.  The gameplay shouldn't overstress a C64.

Torchlight 3 Trailer Videos of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 14 2020 11:24 PM (eqaFC)

2 I got almost all the pieces of my prototype together--a 48MHz ARM M0 with 32K flash and 4K SRAM, and it's on a breadboard with a crystal and all the capacitors necessary to power it on.  Still waiting on a USB port breakout board--I tried cutting up a cable yesterday and soldering jumper wires on the end of it, but when I plugged it in, Windows wouldn't recognize it.  On the other hand, when I used an ARM Arduino to program the bootloader, that seemed to work properly.  Oh, also, I forgot to get an LED, so running the standard "Hello, world!" LED blink won't work.  On the other hand I have a 128x32 pixel display I can use.

I've got several higher-end copies of the MCU--more pins and more flash & RAM, mainly--and breakout boards, but TQPF-64 is tough to hand-solder, so I ordered some solder paste and I'm going to try reflowing it with a heat gun.  That should be interesting.  (I wanted more pins, because the Arduino Pro Mini most people use for custom keyboards have a relatively limited number of IO pins and don't have as many as I want.)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, October 15 2020 12:15 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, October 15 2020 01:43 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, October 15 2020 03:18 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, October 15 2020 10:29 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, October 15 2020 01:05 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, October 15 2020 02:29 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, October 15 2020 02:37 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 16 2020 06:24 AM (eqaFC)

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• Clarke's Corollary to Hanlon's Razor: Any sufficiently profound stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
  
  
  
• Affordable faster-than-1Gb-networking.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And by faster than 1Gb I mean a five-port 2.5Gb switch from Qnap for $109.
  
  10GBASE-T came out in 2006 and we're still waiting for it to become afordable.
  
  
  
• There's a Ryzen 5600 on its way unless there isn't but I think this one's a pretty safe bet.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The Ryzen 5000 launch focused on the mid-range and high end, from the 5600X at $299 to the 5950X at $799.    The six-core 5600 non-X is expected early next year at around $220.
  
  
  
• Benchmarking the Xeon W-1290P.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is the exact one I was looking at, that turned out not much faster - at least on multi-threaded workloads - than a 3700X.
  
  
  
• A new Amiga for 2021?  (Vintage is the New Old)
  
  If it supports the AGA chipset an HDMI, I'll buy one.
  
  
  
• The serverless revolution has stalled.  (InfoQ)
  
  Because it was only ever a niche platform, marketed mostly by complete bullshit.
  
  "I don't need a server!  I can just run functions on demand and store data in a managed database."
  
  (Checks managed database pricing.)
  
  "Fuck."

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 14 2020 01:02 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, October 14 2020 04:33 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, October 14 2020 04:36 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 14 2020 11:22 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, October 14 2020 02:26 PM (Ix1l6)

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• Gawr Gura refers to her membership list as membershrimps.  Does Pekora refer to her followers as pekopons?
  
  
  
  On the downside her voice is not exactly, um, melodic.  On the upside she's a lunatic.
  
  
  
• The Seeed Grove Beginners Kit contains everything you need to get started with Arduino.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  An Arduino Uno with (counts) seventeen headers, plus six I/O devices including a 1" OLED display.  
  
  The article doesn't mention pricing but it's $19.90 on the Seeed store which seems very reasonable for what you get.
  
  That board might look fragile and easy to break, but that's because it is.  It's designed so that when you're ready for a real project you can snap off the individual little boards to make them, um, individual little boards.
  
  
  
• Telepath is a new social network designed by people who think 1984 is a cookbook.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  In closed beta they have two full time thought police already.
  
  
  
• JuliaMono is a monospaced font for scientific computing.  (JuliaMono)
  
  Most notably, it has over ten thousand Unicode characters.  Perfect for implementing your next Roguelike.
  
  
  
  Wonder if it has PETSCII.
  
  Update: Probably.  Looks like all the PETSCII characters have a Unicode equivalent.  (Style64)
  
  
  
• The world's smallest office suite.  (Serge)
  
  Four lines of code.  And a current web browser.
  
  
  
• Rocketmail!  (Vice)
  
  The Pentagon is contracting SpaceX to develop a platform capable of delivering cargoes anywhere in the world within an hour.
  
  Finally we're getting the 21st century we deserve.
  
  
  
• A bot posted the best answers on Reddit for a week.  (KMeme)
  
  People suspected it right away, though it did post some cool stuff before unmasking the Illuminati and having its plug pulled.
  
  
  

Yui, Get the Flammenwerfer Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 13 2020 12:01 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, October 13 2020 01:49 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, October 13 2020 02:02 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, October 13 2020 11:19 AM (PiXy!)

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