Daily Tech News 17 July 2023

• New laptop crashed twice today. Don't know why; I ran the built-in tests and they all came back good.
  
  I loaded two terabytes of stuff onto it over the weekend without a hiccup, and the core temperature seems to be hovering around 54C, which isn't much at all. Only thing I can think of is I was using my Linux VM more, but I don't see why that would make a difference.
  
  I did uninstall McAfee, but that shouldn't make anything worse.
  
  
  
• SpaceX has now launched 1612 satellites using just two rockets. (WCCFTech)
  
  Those are the kinds of numbers you need to achieve if you're serious about taking over the global space launch market, and they is.

• Over 50% of young Danes gave streamed or downloaded content illegally. (Torrentfreak)
  
  The other 50% have learned how to lie.
  
  
  
• The GPT Win 4 (2023) has a 6" 1080p screen, a Ryzen 7840U CPU, and up to 64GB of RAM and 4TB of SSD. (Liliputing)
  
  Why can't we get regular laptops like this? The only thing it doesn't have is a dedicated GPU, which is understandable in a 6" device but they also have a dock with a Radeon 7600M GPU if you need that.
  
  
  
• Christopher Nolan wants Oppenheimer to be a cautionary tale for Silicon Valley. (The Verge)
  
  Don't nuke Hiroshima, check.
  
  I'll also note that President Truman thought that Oppenheimer was a jackass.
  
  
  
• Has the VIC-II chip in your faithful Commodore 64 finally fried itself after forty years? Help may be at hand. (GitHub)
  
  The new version drops straight into the socket previously occupied by your expired chip, but has one or two new tricks, like an 80 column mode, increasing the colours available from 16 to 262,144, supporting VGA, DVI, and HDMI output, an extra 64k of dedicated video RAM, doubling the vertical resolution for modern monitors that can't cope with ancient low-resolution signals, and a blitter.
  
  This is good to see because you can still buy 6502 CPUs. There's a company called Rochester Electronics that has stockpiled fifteen billion old chips because there's always someone, somewhere, who needs fifty original model Z80A processors to replace failed signal controllers in a subway, because running a new controller through modern safety qualifications would cost millions of dollars and take at least a decade.
  
  But custom chips like the VIC-II were never available for Rochester to stockpile, and before long there won't be any working chips left to replace the failed ones.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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