Posts by kuiash

Gamers who find Ryzen 9000s disappointingly slow are testing it wrong, says AMD

Gimme Linux/Compute

Seriously. I'm a Linux hack and I want raw compute performance and, according the Phoronix, that's just what I'll get. Smoke me a kipper...

https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen-9950x-9900x/15

Switzerland to end 2024 with an analog FM broadcast-killing bang

Resilience

You'll prise my home-brew crystal set from my cold dead hand.

72 flights later and a rotor blade short, Mars chopper loses its fight with physics

Godspeed little doodle

EOF

Persistent memory to replace DRAM, but it could take a decade

ARRRGHHHH!

This is the sort of thing I read about when in BYTE when I was a wee-nipper and I've wanted it ever since. JUST DO IT! I've been waiting for MRAM systems for decades know! From a software/systems perspective it's a total no-brainer. Fast? Non-volatile? OMG - sign me up... here's a kidney as advance payment (joke).

Things are going to get weird as the nanometer era draws to a close

Glass substrate you say?

Reminds me of this beauty from eons ago.

http://www.z80.info/sharp/z80_glas.htm

Will anybody save Linux on Itanium? Absolutely not

Sounds something like the 32XXX series. Yeah. They could be tricky but I love coding in ASM so I thought it was great!

From vacuum tubes to qubits – is quantum computing destined to repeat history?

Cost/Performance

Assume that there is a class of algorithms that are "well designed" of Q machines and, conversely, not well dealt with on transistor machines.

Assume that there are companies, with deep pockets, that already spend a gazillion dollars on conventional machines.

If they can build (and run) a Q machine for half the cost and twice the speed as a transistor machine then it's a no-brainer for them.

Some of these guys are running crazy algos for crazy reasons.

Do I want one? Nah. I think putting the required cooling in my laptop or phone is... "problematic"!

NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is returning with its first-ever asteroid sample

Re: Long term weather forecast

Yup - all the birds stopped singing and the cows all lay down like they were going to sleep.. 10 minutes later is was as if nothing had happened.

Re: Long term weather forecast

LOL! Reminds me of the '99 eclipse event. Me and 2 of my buddies made a holiday of it travelling from London to the West Country to pick up another buddy then down through Bristol to Devon and kept going. Living in tents and on a steady diet beans, bread, beer and buckets of scrumpy for a wee we finally arrived somewhere near Lizard Point where an enterprising farmer had converted his stables into a shower block and we stayed in his field for 5 pounds(!!!!). On the day itself it was thick cloud but I'd bought one of those battery powered Casio LCD TVs and we watched the eclipse beamed down from an RAF Nimrod high above us. Regardless of the cloud it was a beeping great week!

Chinese smartphone sales sink to levels not seen since 2012

Also... Why upgrade?

I'm running a 5 years old phone - it still works OK. I still get OS updates. I may get a new one this year if only to get a better camera and bigger screen. But then again, I might not. It's not even money that's the issue. The old one "just works".

Sennheiser Momentum True Wireless 2 earbuds: They're good – though for close to £300, they really should be

Latency?

I bought a pair of pretty good wireless ear buds for my iPad. I like synths.

F'n useless. Hit the snare and the sound turns up a few weeks later.

I guess one doesn't notice this when listening to music or making phones calls but for music creation just use wired.

100 quid spaff'd away cos' I only need them for music making.

Be warned! I had no idea.

Just in case you were expecting 10Gbps, Wi-Fi 6 hits 700Mbps in real-world download tests

If you want to transmit 4K video at 60fps and 10bits per channel you'll need about 15Gbps.

HDMI 2.1 scales up to 48Gbps.

If we want to talk about sending compressed streams then that's a different problem space.

It's all in the RISC: Arm legs it to Computex with a head full of Cortex-A77 CPU, Mali-G77 GPUs

Optional

You abandoned me... RISC don't live here anymore...

Long phone is loooong: Sony swipes at flagship fatigue with 21:9 tall boy

Re: Stand?

Thank you!

Stand?

Does it have a kick stand or a case so it can be stood up on it's long edge? That'd be great for travelling.

Amid polar vortex... Honeywell gets frosty reception after remote smart thermostat tech freezes up for a week

Re: IOT=Crap

Bang on the money. Fucking landfill.

All those Wifi enabled lightbulbs that serve no actual, practically useful purpose nor do they really help aesthetically.

Marketing++ in full effect... Fuck the planet.

*ARGH!* I'll just plant a few more trees for each lightbulb eh? G'z...

Analogue radio is the tech that just won't die

Re: Analogue Radio Must Never Die

Analogue don't need no stinking batteries!

With a nice long aerial (a conductor in a moving magnetic field) you'll get enough juice to run a headset. That's "no battery". Freakin' awesome.

Analogue Radio Must Never Die

It has a MASSIVE advantage over digital, one I hope we'll never need.

Resilience.

As a child I used to beaver away in my dad's shed making radios out of giant antennas, an earth rod, pieces of coal, aluminium foil in between pages of a book (variable cap), pencils and all odds and ends of wire.

There's no way I could ever manufacture a digital radio in anything under a year assuming I can find myself a decent MPU to decode the signal.

Oh, that and TMS and the shipping forecast.

I'm probably being totally OTT but you can make an analogue radio, in times of crisis, out of pretty much any old crap lying around. This is not true of digital.

Even the transmitters aren't that hard. All it is is a modulator & amp and they can be salvaged from plenty of places.

Anyway, I'll get back to downloading me ZX81 programs off MW now. KTHXBAI!

Redis does a Python, crushes 'offensive' master, slave code terms

They should ask Torvalds to rename git.

I double dare you.

What do a meth, coke, molly, heroin stash and Vegas allegedly have in common? Broadcom cofounder Henry Nicolas

Optional

Man. Enough drugs for a major party, or, maybe just enough to keep going for a day or 2 to a major fiend.

This sounds like compulsion, not indulgence.

This guy needs to slow up (or stop) or he's going to burn out physically (and mentally).

He's stuck in groundhog day. I bet he couldn't help himself (or not help himself).

Amazon meets the incredible SHRINKING UK taxman

Dividends/Tax/Profit/Revenue/Van Drivers & Box Packers?

Their use of deflecting share holder payments against their tax payments, whilst legal, is just horrid.

I have to pay my corporation tax and THEN pay out my share dividends.

They should simply have to follow this pattern.

Do the owners of shares have to pay Capital Gains Tax when the exercise them? I assume there's just a numeric bucket of shares, issued by the company, to their employees - then it's up to the employees to sell (I was in a similar scheme and remember open and closed periods for selling)

Last Q - Who is actually receiving these shares? How many of the box packers & van drivers will get one of these tax free windfalls? Does anyone here have a better idea how Amazon operates at this level?

You want to know which is the best smartphone this season? Tbh, it's tricky to tell 'em apart

Blackberry

Can we have an updated passport please?

Swan dive: Intel shares dip under interim CEO Bob as 10nm processor woes worry Wall Street

Re: One small point to make here

If Intel are having problems they could always ask GF to fab for them!

UK Minister of Fun Matt Hancock opens London infosec upstart creche

Mr Hancock

A few million of that would make a huge difference to your constituents. Especially in Haverhill where the Haverhill Science/Tech park is just a bare field and has been for 5 years or so.

Sitting out in the countryside I'm lucky to get 1 mb/s.

*sheesh*

Intel confirms it’ll release GPUs in 2020

Re: Always good to have competition to rein in that nVidia/AMD duopoly

And the rest. Rendition, S3, 3DLabs, Cirrus, Tseng and then there were all the optimisers like VIdeologic (still around in a different guise), Guillemot and thousands more.

The great shake out did for them. A combination of the move to 3D accelerators (well, more than DMA engines with an ALU run the middle) and the eventual (and inevitable) death of the board/optimiser companies.

Building GPUs in now a job for a 1000 people. Only the 5 richest kings in Europe can afford it.

There are many other GPU creators out there. Qualcomm, ARM, Imagination. They just don't play in the PC space.

What Intel got their hands on a few years back was the engineering talent from the once mighty 3DLabs (Ziilabs -> Intel). Maybe they've done something with it but as a company Intel are becoming the new IBM of the 80's. Slow moving, single minded and inflexible.

The last 5 years has seen Intel best everybody on process. The industry as whole is having problems scaling.

Hear that? Of course it's Indiegogo's deadline for a Vega+ whooshing by

Re: F****d.

You know what they say... It's hard to tell incompetence from malice.

Date engraved onto net neutrality tombstone: June 11, 2018

Re: The trickle down effect

Can't remember would said it, but, "Trickle down economics is great... if you liked being pissed on".

What a Hancock-up: MP's social network app is a privacy disaster

Re: playground thinking

He's my local MP. All I can say about him is he's very good at being the very important Matt Hancock and getting his face in the local papers.

A whole f'n page about him, his likes and dislikes, how he likes walking, big picture... like bloody Hello magazine or something. I'm giving them a few weeks to see if they have a right-to-reply page for the other local politicians... all in the name of fairness (no chance in hell!)

I don't really object to him... he doesn't really do anything to object to, or applaud. Just another stuffed suit with the appropriate vocab.

Inside Qualcomm's Snapdragon 845 for PCs, mobes: Cortex-A75s, fat caches, vector math, security stuff, and more

Obscurity Optional (but fails)

Check this guy - he pulls apart the x86 instruction set from the inside out. Really lovely technique, well thought out. Eventually he finds stuff that can kill a CPU stone dead. Nice! Well worth 45 minutes of time. Gotta say, my inner nerd is envious I didn't get to do this job!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrksBdWcZgQ

Sci-Fi titan Jerry Pournelle passes,
aged 84

BYTE

That's how I heard of him. After the initial wave of computer nerdery in the 80s (Sinclair Programs, ZX Computing) had shaken out and I was left with more games/consumer oriented Sinclair User (2nd iteration), Crash, C&VG etc I retreated into the wonderful worlds of Byte, Dr Dobbs and Program Now (whatever happened to that?!).

I must have been one incredibly nerdy teenager... yup... and a goth to boot!

Intel ME controller chip has secret kill switch

Re: repeating it gain

Any irony there would be that "the West" would not trust the Chinese hardware for the same reasons... and they'd be right too...

Sheesh.

The future of Python: Concurrency devoured, Node.js next on menu

Re: Switch Case

Here's Linus at his best ranting about boolean switch statement warnings...

https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/5/27/941

LOL!

Re: Switch Case

It's for Duff's device isn't it?

Switches inside loops with gotos and breaks & conditional continues FTW! I helped write a data analysis app back in the 80s. IIRC that's how we treated resampling. Why? I don't know. Guess we though it was clever!

Oh. Switch is also useful in for breaking C/C++ compatibility.

NASA delivers CREAM-y load to ISS to improve cosmic ray detection

Can't get tired of watching stage 1 nailing that landing! Watched it with the children at tea time yesterday. They're only young but understood when they saw me clapping and heard all the Space X folks whooping n' cheering.

New Amiga to go on sale in late 2017

That's a really cool board. Honest

Really! The CPU core is implemented in an FPGA along with backwards compatible hardware. It really is a 68000. They've called it the 68080 and it runs a LOT faster than the Amiga ever did.

Given the nature of the board it should be possible to build almost anything you like out of it. Yeah, there are probably cheaper Cyclone V boards but, well, this one has all those Amiga bits.

Really, give it a second look. Not necessarily to buy it but just to see these guys have done something technically and cultural very cool indeed.

I never had an Amiga (I just blagged my mates!) but if this thing comes in at around 300 Euros I'll be very tempted. It just has the right "feel".

systemd'oh! DNS lib underscore bug bites everyone's favorite init tool, blanks Netflix

Re: underscore illegal dns character

OK, I got bitten by this recently. Apple updated their stack (somewhere around 10.12) and this bit me.

It "is legal" but not in hostnames.

I used to have my live sites as "somesite.com" and the local (test) version as "somesite_com" in my /etc/hosts file.

Apparently you CAN have an underscores but not in hostnames. Yup, that took some tracking down! I only found it by careful observation (some local domains worked, those with underscores did not).

Hey, standards eh? Everyone loves them. Next I'll tell you about the hell that is JSON and/or XML parsing libraries. Actually, no I won't. This sort of tedious complexity makes me want to go back to programming 6502's in assembler code. *old man mumble*

Softbank promises stronger ARM: Greater overseas reach and double the UK jobs

Re: A week is a long time in politics

Germany has fabs. Real men have fabs.

Sensors, not CPUs, are the tech that swings the smartphone market

Yes they are... sad, confused things. I used to hit "RUN" and enter - Nothing - I'd fucked it up. The machine had no senses anymore - SHIFT+SPACE - maybe... unless I'm on MCode... It can't hear me. The cogs churn but no flour is milled.

It's gone... It only responds to power.

Or a screwdriver in the back.

That moment when an X Session just winks out... maybe you can get back in... maybe.

Now: Shake to reset. Violently... It heard me! *BOOM*