Daily Tech News 5 August 2023

• Karl Nehammer, chancellor of Austria, has proposed enshrining into the country's constitution the right to pay with cash. (AP News)
  
  Nehammer did not kill himself.

• Threads says it will be adding search and web access "soon". (The Verge)
  
  Yes, it launched without those.
  
  
  
• Researchers at MIT have invented an entirely new kind of battery using only cement, water, and carbon black. (The Register)
  
  Plus: Safe and reliable, can power a house using only cheap, common materials.
  Minus: It's a cube twelve feet on a side weighing eighty tons.
  
  Just in case you thought I was joking about battery research yesterday, there's enough information in the article to run that calculation yourself.
  
  
  
• Cloud Provider CoreWeave (who?) has obtained a $2.3 billion debt facility to buy Nvidia H100 AI accelerator cards using its Nvidia H100 AI accelerator cards as collateral. (AnandTech)
  
  Unfortunately CoreWeave is not publicly traded so you can't short them.
  
  
  
• GPT-4 is a room-temperature non-deterministic piece of garbage. (GitHub)
  
  We know that GPT-4 can't give the same answer twice, even if the question is something with only one correct answer, like is 17077 a prime number.
  
  This article examines why, and comes to the conclusion that GPT-4 is poo.
  
  
  
• A look at the Red Hat source distribution brouhaha by someone who has been involved in open source since before there was a term for it. (LPI)
  
  From John "maddog" Hall, the discussion edges into my previous comments on You can't beat free.
  
  
  
• A Snake game for DOS. (GitHub)
  
  

   6800b81fb9a00fb80
   300cd10bfd0078d76
   fc0fafdd21cb382f7
   4f7880fe460bb0400
   241e7a0288cb24147
   402f7db29df39cf77
   d3d1fb8d4102f6f12
   0e474c8382d74c489
   7e004545380d882d7
   4c426ad938827ebc8

  That's it. That's the entire binary file encoded as hexadecimal. Without the encoding it's half that size.
  
  
  
• Now that Intel and Micron have given up on phase-change memory, what's next? DapuStor's Xlenstor2 X2900P, maybe. (Serve the Home)
  
  It's SLC flash, which is very easy to make but nobody does.
  
  800GB is not a lot by current standards, but it has a 20 microsecond read latency, and an 8 microsecond write latency. That write time is about six times faster than a good TLC SSD.
  
  Side-by-side with Intel's discontinued Optane drive it delivers exactly the same single-threaded random write performance, but only half the random reads. Which is probably fine for many applications, since the critical thing is getting data safely written to permanent storage as quickly as possible.
  
  The other advantage of SLC is that it's much more robust than common TLC or QLC cache. (SLC stores one bit per memory cell; MLC two; TLC three; and QLC four.)
  
  With this particular drive you can rewrite its entire contents 100 times per day, every day, for five years. Solidigm's 61TB drive is rated for only 0.6 drive writes per day, though being 75 times bigger the amount of data you can safely write each day to a low-endurance QLC drive works out to half that of the high-endurance specialised SLC drive.
  
  
  
• It costs how much? (Tech America)
  
  Not either of those drives, but an entirely different Solidigm model, an E1.S format 7.68TB drive for $217, which is insane.
  
  Only problem is you need specific server hardware or fiddly adapters to run an E1.S drive.
  
  
  
• But while I was looking up the price of E1.S adapters (turns out they can be found for as little as $20) I tripped over the Sabrent PC-P3X4. (Extreme HW)
  
  It's a PCIe 3.0 x4 card that takes four PCIe 3.0 M.2 SSDs. At around $140 it's more expensive than similar cards that take four PCIe 4.0 SSDs, but it has a very neat trick up its silicon sleeve.
  
  Those PCIe 4.0 cards use a full x16 slot - of which you likely have exactly one - and rely on CPU support for PCIe lane bifurcation to treat the x16 slot as if it were four x4 slots. Not all CPUs support that, and not all motherboards enable it even if the CPU does support it.
  
  This Sabrent card has a PCIe switch chip on it, so it doesn't need that. It works in any slot that can fit a x4 connector. The switch provides four lanes to the slot and two to each drive. That means individual drives max out at around 1.7GBps, which is merely extremely fast, but any two drives running simultaneously can max out the slot bandwidth.
  
  If you want to take advantage of cheap SSD prices to shove a whole lot of fast storage into a PC, this is perfect.

  As I was attempting to wrap up this review, I struggled to identify anything negative. Not that it is expected to have something bad to talk about, but there is almost always something about a product you wish were different. No tinkering in the BIOS is required. No software needs to be downloaded and installed. No drivers need to be installed or kept updated. Nothing here to annoy you or nag you to death about registering your product. I literally could not identify anything to complain about.

  
  
  
• Meanwhile, the most annoying thing of the day: Windows 11 updated itself on my new laptop and lost the touchpad driver. This is something Windows 10 does too, and it's utter garbage.
  
  You either have to dig a USB mouse out of a drawer or remember keyboard shortcuts you haven't used since the last time Windows fucked this up and try to fumble your way through repeatedly removing and reinstalling the driver until Windows decides that yes, your laptop actually does have a touchpad, just as it did ten minutes ago before Windows decided to update itself.
  
  
  
• Least annoying thing of the day: I've had a couple of issues with my new HP laptop - though much less since I stopped messing around trying to get MongoDB 5 running inside VirtualBox - but the built-in tests accessed by pressing F2 during boot are great.
  
  There's a test for everything, including the touchpad. Takes ten seconds to confirm there is nothing wrong with the hardware and it's just Windows being Windows. I'd rather not need to run the tests, but it's the best built-in test suite I've seen in consumer hardware, and the Pavilion 14 is not a premium model either.
  
  
  
• Not annoying at all thing of the day: Pathfinder redemption codes on Humble Bundle. I saw there was a new Pathfinder bundle up and realised that I hadn't redeemed the previous bundle, and sure enough the codes expired three days ago.
  
  So I thought, maybe, maybe they'll still work.
  
  They did.
  
  I checked for any other expired codes I might have, found some from two years ago, and tried those as well.
  
  They also worked.
  
  Thumbs up for Paizo.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

| Access Comments