Daily Tech News 17 December 2022

• What do you call 1000 dead cryptocurrencies at the bottom of the sea? A good start. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  After everyone and their cat jumped on the bandwagon in 2021, 2022 saw a net reduction in the number of cryptocurrencies plaguing the world. Not a dramatic reduction - a little under 10% - but we'll take what we can get.
  
  
  

• Nuclear power is too slow - but it doesn't need to be. (Jack Devanney)
  
  Back in the sixties, California built a 500MW nuclear power station in three years. Reactor builds started in 1973 took an average of sixteen years to be completed and connected to the grid.
  
  The cause was a combination of a shortage of expertise at the high end, and an excess of idiots in government.
  
  But Japan maintained an average completion time of less than four years from 1963 through 2009, which shows what you can do if you feed regulators to the sharks.
  
  
  
• Installing Linux on a $8 computer. (The Little Engineer That Could)
  
  The $8 computer in question is the 0x64 board, a RISC-V competitor to the Raspberry Pi Pico. The CPU in the 0x64 has a proper MMU so it can run full-fledged Linux and not just an embedded version of it.
  
  The 0x64 dev tools are apparently still a bit rough and ready at this stage, and the author found that the easiest way to get Linux onto the board was to use a Pi Pico as a programming interface.
  
  
  
• The Periodic Tiling Conjecture is false. (Quanta)
  
  If you're familiar with Penrose tiling we know that with as few as two suitably shaped tiles, you can tile a surface of any size without any gaps - but so that the pattern of the tiles doesn't repeat, something called aperiodicity. But we also know that there is no single shape that holds that property, at least not for two-dimensional surfaces.
  
  The conjecture was that this would also hold in higher dimensions - any shape that could fill the space without any gaps could not also exhibit aperiodicity.
  
  Turns out it can.
  
  Keep that in mind when planning your next seven-dimensional bathroom or kitchen.
  
  
  
• The ONEXPLAYER 2 is an 8.4" tablet with a 2560x1600 screen. (Liliputing)
  
  And a Ryzen 6800U and up to 32GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD. And it's an inch thick and starts at $899.
  
  They took the two things I want that nobody currently makes - an 8" tablet with a high-resolution screen, and a Ryzen 6800U laptop with 32GB of RAM - and smooshed them together into a useless mess.
  
  Sigh.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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