Daily Tech News 19 September 2021

• I fixed the SSL certificates, in case you were wondering why the blog looked funny. If you weren't wondering, the CSS file probably hadn't expired from your browser cache before I fixed it.
  
  
  
• A tale of two protests: The DC protest rally didn't happen because it glowed bright enough to be seen with the naked eye from the Oort Cloud.
  
  The Melbourne protest went right ahead. The police locked down public transport and major roads in the center of Melbourne in preparation... So fifteen minutes before the event was supposed to start, the organisers simply moved it by a couple of miles.
  
  
  
• AMD's next-gen graphics cards could triple the rendering power over the current generation. (WCCFTech)
  
  At the high end they're also expected to cost twice as much - but twice as much as current MSRP, not twice current retail, which is close to twice MSRP anyway. Since they're not expected to ship until late next year (ignore where it says Q4 2021, that's an error) we might actually see supply constraints somewhat improved and prices likewise.
  
  The mid-range 7600XT will have - according to these leaks - similar hardware to the current high-end 6900XT, but with more cache and less memory bandwidth.

• It being a slow news day, I'm going to post some of the stuff I would usually filter out.
  
  
  
• KySync is a multi-threaded file-distribution protocol based on Zsync. (Kyall)
  
  Somewhere between Rsync and BitTorrent as far as I can make out.
  
  
  
• Excision's CRISPR HIV therapy has been cleared for human testing by the FDA. (Fierce Biotech)
  
  Good. Probably.
  
  
  
• Sysz is an fzf terminal UI for systemctl. (GitHub)
  
  Fuck systemd.
  
  
  
• Toshiba's N300 18TB NAS drives use FC-MAMR. (Serve the Home)
  
  This uses a spin torque oscillator to focus the magnetic flux of the write head, increasing the capacity of the drive by, um, 12.5%.
  
  Oh, and an uncorrectable error rate of 1 in 1014 bits. Allegedly.
  
  
  
• An open source DRM driver has been made available for Mediatek AI cores. (Phoronix)

  ... DRM driver that implements communication between the CPU and an APU. This uses VirtIO buffer to exchange messages. For the data, we allocate a GEM object and map it using IOMMU to make it available to the APU.

  It also makes julienne fries.
  
  
  
• AMD and Valve are focusing on a P-State / CPPC driver with Schedutil. (Phoronix)
  
  This is to improve performance of the recently announced Steam Deck portable gaming console.
  
  I think.
  
  
  
• KWinFT is continuing work on the WLROOTS render / library split. (Phoronix)
  
  No idea, sorry.
  
  
  
• Google is resetting permissions on billions of Android apps. (Thurrott.com)
  
  This will be annoying for users but is probably a good idea. Permissions used to be rather lax and apps were installed with permissions they never really needed. Those permissions will be taken away so an update to a game can't start checking the numbers you dial even if you originally said it could, three years ago.
  
  
  
• If you want an iPad Mini 6 because it's the only good small tablet around, be prepared to wait. (9to5Mac)
  
  Pre-orders have been pushed out to November.
  
  It's also rather expensive. Samsung's Galaxy Tab A7 Lite is a quarter the price, and is a perfectly viable alternative if you don't care about typography. The iPad has a 2266x1488 display, which is fine at 8"; the Samsung has a 1340x800 display, which simply isn't enough.

posted by Pixy Misa at 03:44 AM

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