Daily Tech News 8 October 2023

• Samsung's new small Android tablet, the Galaxy Tab A9, is here, and it's shit. (Liliputing)
  
  The 8.7" screen has a resolution of 1340x800, barely better than Google's original Nexus 7 model from 2012. The 2013 model immediately fixed that with a much improved 1920x1200 screen.
  
  To still be offering such low resolutions in 2023 is laughable. Every other spec is good - it's like offering a high performance sports car with 9" wheels.
  
  There's a Tab 9+ model with a 1920x1200 screen - but that's 11", and there are literally dozens of models like that.

• Berry is a scripting language for microcontrollers. (Berry)
  
  Without the compiler it needs just 40k of ROM and 4k of RAM, so it will fit easily in a Raspberry Pi Pico, which has 2M of ROM and 264k of RAM.
  
  The whole thing, compiled, is under 300k.
  
  The language itself is very clean and simple. If you know Python all you need to do is remember to put in end statements and stop with the : at the beginning of blocks. If you know Ruby you'll just need to adapt to Python-style classes and exceptions.
  
  Is it fast... Uh, no, not particularly. Faster than Python in trivial benchmarks. More than 20 times slower than LuaJIT - though that is rather less suitable for use on microcontrollers.
  
  
  
• Senators Marco Rubio and Mark Warner want to block China from building RISC-V processors... Which are open source. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I wondered if there was more to this than there seemed at first glance, so I also read the Reuters article linked by Tom's Hardware.
  
  Nope. It's just stupid. It's like trying to forbid China from learning algebra. It's already out there, you idiots.
  
  
  
• Gibson Research, maker for many many years of hard drive repair tool SpinRite, has released a free utility to check USB drives. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There's been a flood of implausibly cheap drives recently with implausibly large capacities from implausibly-named vendors like... Huh. Amazon seems to have been cleaning up a bit. Though there are still a whole lot of 2TB micro SD cards from "Lenovo" that you shouldn't touch with a burnt stick.
  
  Anyway, they put a 4GB microSD card inside a USB thumb drive and reprogram it to pretend to be 2TB. Plug it in, write files to it, it all works fine. Until you use 4GB of space whereupon it simply starts overwriting earlier data.
  
  
  
• Asus has a new PCIe card that can take four PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSDs, for a combined 60GBps of bandwidth. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That sounds like it should be horribly expensive, but it's just $80. That's because all the logic needed to run it is built into your CPU... If you have an AMD chip.
  
  If you're on Intel you may find that only two of the four slots work.
  
  And you can only put it in the primary PCIe slot in your system - where the graphics card would normally go.
  
  Good for building small servers though, where you don't need a graphics card at all.
  
  
  
• Should you buy a $3 SSD made by a brand you've never heard of from AliExpress? (Storage Review)
  
  No, but they're better than Storage Review's performance graphs, which somehow go backwards.
  
  
  
• Smart programmers write STUPID code. (Medium)
  
  Please tell me that's not an acronym.

  The S stands for Simple

  Closes browser.
  Shuts down laptop.
  Sets laptop on fire.
  Flings burning laptop from window.
  
  
  
• Cloudflare's support for "Encrypted Client Hello" breaks ISP-level site blocking. (Torrentfreak)
  
  Europe is very fond of this. Australia does it too. America mostly just shoots the site operators.
  
  Anyway, with this technology the ISP can no longer tell what website you are looking at, so they can't block you. And they can't block Cloudflare because that's about 16% of the entire internet, including a lot of major sites.
  
  
  
• Brave has laid off 9% of its workforce. (Tech Crunch)
  
  I hope they weather the Recession We Must Not Name, because their browser is pretty good and they haven't piled up millions of dollars and set it on fire like so many other tech startups.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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