Author Archives: pappp

TSMC will stop making 7 nm chips for Chinese customers

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Ooh. That's some serious geopolitical news.
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QNX is now free for anything non-commercial, plus there’s an RPi image

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Hasn't QNX opened up to varying degrees several times before, eventually followed by a pull back to more restrictive terms? QNX is nifty, and I have fond memories of that cute QNX demo floppy that booted a responsive graphical desktop with networking, but with Moore's law gains and RTLinux finally getting mainlined this year, I suspect the appeal of a freeish small Unix with RT features is reduced.
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A Brief History of Cyrix

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Lost this article in my tab forest the other day, just found and read it. It's a good narrative read for a somewhat complicated story.
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Touchscreens are out, and tactile controls are back

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Please let it be true! I've been waiting for us to move back toward tactile interfaces for like 20 years, before we even got to the worst of it.
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Reddit is profitable for the first time ever, with nearly 100 million daily users

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: Aw crap, they succeeded in entering the "value extraction" phase.
Pink text reading “reddit” with also pink portions of the Reddit alien’s head occupying the bottom right and top left corners of the image, the top one upside down, all on a black background.
Image: The Verge

Reddit just turned a profit for the first time. As part of its third-quarter earnings results released on Tuesday, the company reported a profit of $29.9 million, along with $348.4 million in revenue — a 68 percent increase year over year.

The company hasn’t been profitable at any point in its nearly 20-year history. Since going public, Reddit lost $575 million during its first quarter on the market, but it decreased that loss to $10 million last quarter, and is now finally in the green.

Reddit also grew to 97.2 million daily users over the past few months, marking a 47 percent increase from the same time last year. That number exceeded 100 million users on some days during the quarter, Reddit says.

Reddit’s advertising revenue grew to...

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Strava was used to locate the most powerful people

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The same kind of stunt made the news in 2018, and it's pretty obvious that automatically posting your location data somewhere public means anyone who wants to can track you, not just nation-states squeezing it out of your cell phone provider. And, the Ukrainians just used the same trick to assassinate a Russian general. But, as ever, most people aren't going to think about electronic privacy.
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Linus Torvalds: AI is 90% marketing, 10% reality

Source: Boing Boing

Article note: That seems about right, there are a handful of nifty and potentially useful things coming out of this AI Hype cycle. But most of it is useless gimmicks and executive FOMO.
Torvalds giving hardware vendor NVidia the finger at a 2012 talk.

The creator and lead maintaner of Linux says AI is 90% marketing, 10% reality. Linus speaks for a lot of us, I think! That it's marketed as "AI" in the first place is a good example of what he's talking about. — Read the rest

The post Linus Torvalds: AI is 90% marketing, 10% reality appeared first on Boing Boing.

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Mac Desktop DynaComp DCF-803 Recap

DynaComp DCF-803 PSU, as used in Apple Centris 610/Quadra 660AV/ PowerMac 6100 Systems

Since finally being rid of my PhD work, I’ve been hitting a bunch of projects that have been on my TODO list for ages.
The oldest so far is this PSU which has been sitting for …decades… in my parts pile with some compatible machines, and I’ve always intended to try rebuilding it. It died with a “ticking” symptom some time in the mid-00s.

I finally got around to it this week, and it wasn’t a bad job. About $10 of parts, a few hours of work, and it’s back in action. Rebuild details below.

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Posted in Computers, DIY, Electronics, General, Objects | 1 Comment

Pull Your Xbox Clock Capacitor

If you have an OG Xbox sitting on a shelf somewhere, this is your reminder to pull the clock capacitor and clean up whatever corrosive goo it has already vomited out.
I was talking old video games with a student in one of my labs this week and it reminded me that this is one of the many projects I’ve been meaning to get to but haven’t had time for for the last several years.

Photo highlighting the leaked clock capacitor in an OG Xbox.

Microsoft used some cheap 2.5V 1F early super caps which will inevitably fail and spray electrolyte on your motherboard, because they made some cost-cutting choices about the RTC, so now everyone with an old Xbox has to fix it.

iFixit has their usual helpful guide for pulling it apart, and the ConsoleMods wiki has the details on the clock cap situation. I didn’t even bother replacing the one in mine, I don’t pull my old Xbox out enough for it to matter.
Remove dead cap, clean residue thoroughly, move on. It’s a quick job.

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McDonald’s busted ice cream machines can now be fixed — legally

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: Right to Repair is good for everyone except for rentseeking parasites.
A photo showing someone holding an ice cream at McDonald’s
Photo by Gerald Matzka/picture alliance via Getty Images

McDonald’s always-broken ice cream machines might finally get easier to fix. That’s because the US Copyright Office granted an exemption allowing third parties to diagnose and repair commercial equipment — including the ones that make your McFlurries.

Now, franchise owners will be able to break through the digital locks that have blocked them from repairing McDonald’s ice cream machines for years. According to the Copyright Office, the exemption will allow people to diagnose, perform maintenance, and repair “retail-level commercial food preparation equipment.” McDonald’s ice cream machines have become so notorious for breaking that someone even created a tool to track broken machines.

The decision is part of the Copyright Office’s final...

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