Daily Tech News 6 December 2022

• Intel says Moore's Law is alive and well, and plans to produce trillion-transistor chips by 2030. (Hot Hardware)
  
  This must be a source of some amusement to its rivals at TSMC where they manufacture the 2.6 trillion transistor WSE-2 AI chip for Cerebras.
  
  Admittedly that chip is the size of a dinner plate and systems using it start at around $2 million, but on the other hand it already exists.
  
  
  
• Also already existing are the desk legs I ordered and the Kindle Paperwhite I got to replace my unfunctional Tab M8 FHD.
  
  Ikea packs things really well, by the way. Amazon tends to just toss expensive stuff into a lightweight box with maybe a bit of packing paper to keep it company, and then deals with the complaints later.

• Moon's haunted: After a successful trip to and around the Moon, NASA's Orion spacecraft* has had some issues with ghost breakers. (WCCFTech)
  
  The computerised circuit breakers are supposed to trip on command or when something goes horribly wrong, but instead half of them tripped for no reason at all. And cut off half the maneuvering thrusters in the process, something that could be inconvenient if it happened at the wrong moment.
  
  The next Orion flight is expected in, uh, two years.
  
  * Not old bang-bang, sadly. See Niven & Pournelle's Footfall if you're not familiar.
  
  
  
• The making of Dune II. (Read Only Memory)
  
  I always wondered by the sequel to the Dune computer game was in a completely different genre - the first an adventure game, the second a real-time strategy title.
  
  This article explains that: It wasn't a sequel, not even in the strictly temporal sense. Once the producers obtained the rights to make Dune computer games, they hired two studios to produce two entirely different games at the same time.
  
  Dune I was unremarkable and is largely forgotten. Dune II on the other hand pulled together all the elements of a real-time strategy game for the first time, and is the direct parent of the entire Command & Conquer series.
  
  
  
• You can't let just anybody look at the sky! (Scientific American)
  
  The US government plans to require public release of all date from publicly-funded science. The article argues that this is bad for science, because other scientists can look at the data and, well:

  I have a friend in Minsk
  Who has a friend in Pinsk
  Whose friend in Omsk
  Has friend in Tomsk
  With friend in Akmolinsk
  His friend in Alexandrovsk
  Has friend in Petropavlovsk
  Whose friend somehow is solving now
  The problem in Dnepropetrovsk
  
  And when his work is done
  Haha! Begins the fun
  From Dnepropetrovsk to Petropavlovsk
  By way of Iliysk and over Novorossiysk
  To Alexandrovsk to Akmolinsk
  To Tomsk to Omsk
  To Pinsk to Minsk
  To me the news will run
  Yes, to me the news will run!
  
  And then I write by morning, night
  And afternoon, and pretty soon
  My name in Dnepropetrovsk is cursed
  When he finds out I published first!

  I didn't say it was a very good argument.
  
  
  
• How "goblin mode" became Oxford's word of the year. (NPR)
  
  First, that's not a word.
  
  Second, people voted for it. It was an online poll. And it mopped the floor with the competition, because the competition was "metaverse" (which is at least a word) and "#IStandWith".
  
  Third, I wonder if that's in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. I shall take a look, because that just arrived too. (I'd love to get the full 20-volume set, but it's pretty expensive.)
  
  
  
• Twitter turns its back on open-source development. (ZDNet)
  
  Is it true?
  
  No. It's just more wishcasting by another left-wing pro-censorship journalist. (Which is pretty much all of them.)
  
  Interesting tidbit from the article though: Twitter was developing its own custom JVM, which is a really dumb idea. The company isn't nearly big enough - let along profitable enough - to support work like that.
  
  
  
• Setting up container backups on the new server. Much cleaner than the old rsync-and-hope system.
  
  I plan to migrate the old MyISAM tables to either Aria or InnoDB, which will make them crash safe. Not certain that the code will work correctly with InnoDB, because it's properly transactional, but Aria is just a better MyISAM.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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