That would be the 25mm2 stuff, about 9mm diameter. Pretty standard for electric ovens.

The joy of producing electricity from renewables at 12Vdc is that you can run it straight into a whole bank of car and truck batteries for storage. Can then either use it directly for powering things - there's a lot of things like portable tellies for use in a caravan that are 12V for this reason - or feed it to an inverter to get 240Vac for 'normal' usage. Again, large outdoor stores will have them, because they're intended for this usage.

This would work better the other way round, tho.

Cheaper for now, since venture capitalist cash is paying to keep those extremely expensive servers running. The AI experiments at my work (automatically generating documentation) have got about an 80% reject rate - sometimes they're not right, sometimes they're not even wrong - and it's not really an improvement on time having to review it all versus just doing the work.

No doubt there are places where AI makes sense; a lot of those places seem to be in enhancing the output of someone who is already very skilled. So let's see how "cheaper" works out.

PS3 most certainly had a separate GPU - was based on the GeForce 7800GTX. Console GPUs tend to be a little faster than their desktop equivalents, as they share the same memory. Rather than the CPU having to send eg. model updates across a bus to update what the GPU is going to draw in the next frame, it can change the values directly in the GPU memory. And of course, the CPU can read the GPU framebuffer and make tweaks to it - that's incredibly slow on desktop PCs, but console games can do things like tone mapping whenever they like, and it's been a big problem for the RPCS3 developers to make that kind of thing run quickly.

The cell cores are a bit more like the 'tensor' cores that you'd get on an AI CPU than a full-blown CPU core. They can't speak to the RAM directly, just exchange data between themselves - the CPU needs to copy data in and out of them in order to get things in and out, and also to schedule any jobs that must run on them, they can't do it themselves. They're also a lot more limited in what they can do than a main CPU core, but they are very very fast at what they can do.

If you are doing the kind of calculations where you've a small amount of data that needs a lot of repetitive maths done on it, they're ideal. Bitcoin mining or crypto breaking for instance - set them up, let them go, check in on them occasionally. The main CPU acts as an orchestrator, keeping all the cell cores filled up with work to do and processing the end results. But if that's not what you're trying to do, then they're borderline useless, and that's a problem for the PS3, because most of its processing power is tied up in those cores.

Some games have a somewhat predictable workload where offloading makes sense. Got some particle effects - some smoke where you need to do some complicated fluid-and-gravity simulations before copying the end result to the GPU? Maybe your main villain has a very dramatic cape that they like to twirl, and you need to run the simulation on that separately from everything else that you're doing? Problem is, working out what you can and can't offload is a massive pain in the ass; it requires a lot of developer time to optimise, when really you'd want the design team implementing that kind of thing; and slightly newer GPUs are a lot more programmable and can do the simpler versions of that kind of calculation both faster and much more in parallel.

The Cell processor turned out to be an evolutionary dead end. The resources needed to work on it (expensive developer time) just didn't really make sense for a gaming machine. The things that it was better at, are things that it just wasn't quite good enough at - modern GPUs are Bitcoin monsters, far exceeding what the cell can do, and if you're really serious about crypto breaking then you probably have your own ASICs. Lots of identical, fast CPU cores are what developers want to work on - it's much easier to reason about.

Yeah. Unless they've some ulterior motive for porting their RE engine to iOS, then this is insane. That kind of cash will barely fund a senior engineer for a month once you've paid out overheads as well.

If they're planning to have some kind of phone tie-in to the next Resi game, then maybe it might have made sense to work the compatibility issues out. An app that runs on your phone that makes it "your phone in game", so you can receive texts from the president's daughter while shooting some definitely-not-Spaniards on your Playstation, bit of an augmented-reality thing. Could be a laugh to have your phone be in control of a drone so that you can see round corners, while juggling the other things you're doing? But probably mostly so that you can get dinged for microtransactions.

Thanks for all the great work, squire - I know it's a bit thankless. Let us know if the well's running dry.

I think when Disney demands an internally-hosted version of your product, then the sales team tells engineering that they'll provide one, and mark the price up accordingly. That kind of thing doesn't appear on the external listing for everyone else.

Man alive, I thought that Mozilla had been doing their own Personal Package Archives so that we didn't have to deal with Ubuntu packaging it as a Snap anymore. And this is doubly disappointing.

Note that bookmakers set their odds to minimise their own potential losses - if more bets are placed on a team, then they'll reduce the odds. So this graph will be weighted towards the larger bets placed by supporters of the wealthier nations.

Still cool, tho.

Wife's birthday tomorrow, and she wants rid of the Tories as a present. Fortunately, that's what I was going to get her anyway.

Needs an endless repeating loop in there, plus one slang word spelled out in ridiculous furneticccc fashion, otherwise it's just not Joyce. AIs just have no appreciation of great art.

time for brekkie again, bit of a walk, wanked off on the beach, got burrrrrluckesaaaid with a bunch of prozzies while me wife cucked me and back home in

Oh, one of our customers' users deleted the /var directory on one of the servers we provided to them, because it was "taking up too much space on disk". That's where Postgres saves its DBs as well; wiped out weeks of work in production for them. This hits very close to home.

There's three regions missing here - region 0 is "worldwide", region 7 is "special purpose", Oscar screening DVDs and the like, and region 8 is "international waters" for cruise ships and things. You can set several regions on the same disk, to make a 2/4/5 and the like. Set each region as a bit, and you can store that in a single byte - that makes it very easy to flash the firmware on DVD players to decide which disks they can play. Aus/NZ will want content in English and Latin America will want Spanish or Portuguese, so the DVD consortium can still get up to their often-illegal, certainly immoral, price fixing and bullshit.

Really, fuck DVDs. So much potential in the increased capacity, and then it was mired in crap like this and "disabled user operations" so that you can't skip trailers. Time to raise the black flag and set sail for prosperous waters, me hearties.

The kernel option is mitigations=off, if you want to try adding it to your Grub command line? From the testing I've done, provides no benefits whatsoever - no more frames in games, compilation runs no quicker, battery life on a laptop is no better.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Improving_performance#Turn_off_CPU_exploit_mitigations

If you made memory access lines twice as wide, they'd take up more space. More space means (a) chips run slower, because it takes time for the electricity to get there (b) they'd be bigger and more expensive.

The main problem with 32-bit, as others have noticed, is that that's not really so much RAM. CPUs do addition and subtraction the way we were taught at school - 'carry the one', they've an overflow bit that's set when your sum doesn't fit in the columns. On 8-bit CPUs, we were always checking back when adding up large numbers. On 64-bit CPUs, we can deal with truly massive numbers anyway, it's not such a hassle. And they're so fast at doing sums anyway and usually waiting for memory, it's barely a hassle.

Moving to 128-bit would give us a truly minuscule, probably unmeasurable, benefit in exchange for significant downsides. We could make them, but it would be pointless.

Yeah; as a native and fairly well-educated speaker, I'm fucked if I can form the past participles of some of our verbs

If I swim across a river, is it now the swimmed river? Swum river? Swam river?

If I sneak into a room, have I sneaked? Snuck? Both sound wrong.

Didn't find anything ambiguous about 'costed', it works for me.

Got this installed on all my work machines - if you're wanting to stick a screenshot on Jira or Slack with a couple of arrows, wavy lines, or a bit blurred out then it's dead quick and has just the functionality that you need. Yes, it's simple and lacks a lot of 'power tools'. Sometimes that's just what you need, tho.

Thought the text said that they were going to do Grimes. I'm up for some crimes, tho.

Nah, that there's an armsadillo. You can tell, because he has two.

emerges from a brand you've probably never heard of

Writing this on a Tuxedo Pulse 14 / gen 3 as we speak. Great little laptop. I'd wanted something with a few more pixels than my previous machine, and there's a massive jump from bog-standard 1080p to extremely expensive 4K screens. Three megapixel screen at a premium-but-not-insane price, compiles code like a champion, makes an extremely competent job of 3D gaming, came with Linux and runs it all perfectly.

"Tuxedo Linux", which is their in-house distro, is Ubuntu + KDE Plasma. Seemed absolutely fine, although I replaced it with Arch btw since that's more my style. Presumably they're using Debian for the ARM support on this new one? This one runs pretty cold most of the time, but you definitely know that you've got a 54W processor in a very thin mobile device when you try eg. playing simulation games - it gets a bit warm on the knees. "Not x64" would be a deal-breaker for my work, but for most uses the added battery life would be more valuable than the inconvenience.