Daily Tech News 5 August 2024

• Venture capitalists have flushed $1.6 billion down the drain trying to make lab-grown meat a reality. (Tech Crunch)
  
  The most optimistic proponents are now hoping to someday capture 0.03% of the global meat market.
  
  Farm grown meat is cheaper, tastes better, is readily available, and probably won't devour the world in a Gray Goo apocalypse.
  
  Though the chickens might try. You can't trust 'em.
  
  
  
• Please let me know if the blog is loading slow for you, and if it is, what kind of device and browser you are using. Several reports of this over the past 24 hours but it's hard to track down.

• How to run DOS on modern hardware. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The way the economy is going this might be useful information.
  
  
  
• Adding RAM to an RP2040. (Dmitry)
  
  This is the chip used in the Raspberry Pi Pico. It doesn't have a memory bus in the usual sense, but supports external serial (SPI) ROM and has an onboard cache to keep things fast.
  
  You can also wire up SPI RAM - but it will be read-only because the RP2040 is expecting ROM, not RAM.
  
  You can get around that, but it's, uh, interesting.
  
  
  
• The Breville Oracle Jet is a $2000 computer that makes coffee. (The Verge)
  
  Okay.
  
  
  
• KOSA - the Kids Online Safety Act - is dead. For now. (TechDirt)
  
  I haven't linked TechDirt much lately since Mike Masnick went insane, but he seems to be having a lucid day. He praises the House GOP for killing the train wreck bipartisan Senate bill, and approvingly quotes Rand Paul's scathing letter.
  
  
  
• Need for Speed: SSD Edition. (Serve the Home)
  
  This is Kioxia's (formerly Toshiba) latest datacenter drive aimed at low latency rather than transfer rates. It's about twice as fast as typical SSDs - access times of around 25 microseconds vs. a more typical 50 microseconds.
  
  It's intended to replace phase-change drives in heavy workloads, now that Intel and Micron have abandoned phase-change memory entirely.
  
  Intel's Optane drives could get access times down to 10 microseconds, but they were power hungry and expensive, and ultimately not commercially successful.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:13 AM

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