Saturday, June 27

Geek

Daily News Stuff 26 June 2020

Oxygen Frequency Edition

Tech News

  • Twitter is a strange place.



    It probably won't show up here, but if you click through to Twitter, that post has a COVID-19 warning.


  • Want a mini supercomputer? You can get your own two-node A64FX system for just $40,000. (AnandTech)

    These are the chips that power the world's fastest supercomputer. However, it doesn't have two of them, it has 3168.


  • Arm-based Macs will be great for developers! (ML Illustrated)

    Assuming you are targeting MacOS or iOS. Sure, Docker will be a disaster, but that's fine, just don't use Docker.

    Actually I agree with that last part.


  • CLK is an emulator for 8 and 16-bit systems, including the Apple II and Vic-20. (GitHub)

    It... Uh. It produces an extremely accurate emulation of how games would have actually appeared by generating a composite video signal in software, and then decoding it again, in software, into a modern direct RGB bitmap.

    So it emulates not only the computer, but the monitor.


  • That's slightly creepy.



    No, not slightly.


  • Those favicons are up to no good again. (Bleeping Computer)

    In this case, a malicious script was embedded in the EXIF data of the icon. So the HTML and JavaScript would not contain any obvious nasties, but would be able to inspect and execute code from the favicon.


  • Boot Camp will die along with the Intel Mac lineup. (ZDNet)

    But that's no loss, because the only reason you'd use Boot Camp is for games, and Macs, even running Windows, are terrible for gaming.

    ...

    And that's a good thing.


  • There may be another Xbox on the way. (The Verge)

    It looks like there will be a lower-spec console, with probably 10GB of RAM and a much smaller GPU, but with the new Zen cores. This would replace the current Xbox One S, which has the old and relatively sluggish Jaguar cores.

Playlist of the Day

On second thoughts, no, let's not do that.


Video of the Day

Let's update the Asus TUF 15.  With a Dremel!



I watched the original video, which was pretty damning, but don't think I posted it.  Here they go the extra mile and it's definitely worth a look.  Five minutes' work and a voided waranty boosted clock speeds under full load from 2.3GHz to 2.9GHz.


Disclaimer: Oxygen frequency!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:42 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 388 words, total size 4 kb.

1 Arrows labelling obvious stuff. Posed, non-running power tool. Soy-boy mugging for the camera. Video did not get a click from me for some reaon.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, June 27 2020 06:13 AM (obo9H)

2 EXIF data is supposed to be DATA! Who in their right mind would attempt to EXECUTE that data?

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, June 27 2020 07:51 AM (Ix1l6)

3 That's the blind spot they exploited: if you don't expect metadata to contain code, you don't scan it for possibly-hostile code. There are all sorts of data-parsing libraries for JS, and any of them could pull out a string of code and run eval() on it.

The image itself remains perfectly safe to view with standard software; it's just a place to hide the payload for other malware from scanners that check HTML and JS files and ignore images.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, June 27 2020 11:34 AM (ZlYZd)

4 normal - anyone willing to buy a $2000 laptop, cut holes in it, and actually measure the effects and test their hypothesis gets a click from me.


Particularly when they get a 600MHz clock speed improvement and get into an online brawl with Asus.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, June 27 2020 03:43 PM (PiXy!)

5 They all have semi- to moderately-clickbaity titles & teaser images these days; Youtube seems to reward it.  But it's still interesting sometimes.  I haven't seen this video yet but I'm going to watch it.
Other Linus did one recently where he tried to see if he could boost the performance of the most recent MacBook Air.  What he mostly got was wild thermals tamed, because the laptop doesn't have a heatpipe, the heatsink is tiny, and doesn't even make good contact with the CPU!  (They actually lapped the mounting points of the heatsink to make it come in better contact.)  I won't spoil the results beyond that.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, June 28 2020 01:55 AM (Iwkd4)

6 BTW, for anyone who doesn't know, Hardware Unboxed is related/affiliated with Techspot, which has a good reputation as far as I know.  I think the guy in the video is the one who does Techspot's hardware reviews.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, June 28 2020 02:02 AM (Iwkd4)

7 Sorry--hit Post too soon, just one more comment:  their videos--I've seen about 1 minute of this one at this point--are usually well-done and not garbage at all.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, June 28 2020 02:02 AM (Iwkd4)

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




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