Daily Tech News 28 December 2023

• If you were looking to buy the latest Apple Watch Series 9 or Ultra 2, you can. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Or will be able to shortly. And perhaps briefly.
  
  Apple has won a temporary stay on the ITC ban from a federal court, while it files its full appeal. That only applies through to January 10, depending on the outcome of other proceedings.

• Bought a new router. And 15 bits. Which came in a box.
  
  
  
• You should use a hair dryer when bending your 12VHPWR cables for your new RTX 4090, says power supply manufacturer Seasonic. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, okay.
  
  
  
• You should absolutely not use a hair dryer when bending your 12VHPWR cables for your new RTX 4090, and we never suggested you should, says power supply manufacturer Seasonic. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, okay.
  
  
  
• Is-Prime is a library - available in 70 languages - to determine whether any given number is prime, in constant time. (GitHub)
  
  It's very compact, easily ported, and 95% reliable.
  
  
  
• If you are intrigued by this allow me to present a library that determines whether any given unsigned 32-bit integer is even or odd. (Blabbin')
  
  Since the C compiler had a limit of 16 million lines of code per file, it's written directly in machine code. 40GB of it.

  As a side note, the program is amazingly performant. For small numbers the results are instantaneous and for the large number close to the 2^32 limit the result is still returned in around 10 seconds. Considering the computer has to read 40 GB of data from disk, map it to physical memory and then let the CPU has a rip of it without many chances of caching is honestly quite mind blowing. For reference, the computer is a Core i5 12600K with 32 GB memory and the files are residing on a M.2 SSD disk. While calculating, the peak read speed I saw from the SSD was around 800 MB/s (which doesn't really make sense as that should give execution speeds at 40+ seconds, but computers are magical so who knows what is going on).

  Just don't let the smoke out.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

| Access Comments