SoylentNews

The walls are closing in!

No, really!

The people that did 9/11* are gonna get nukes! Eh, at least they buy the best...

Like... WTF?!

*No, not that 9/11

TOTAL & COMPLETE EXXONERATION!!!!! You know what I'm talking about. You know. I'm talking about the brilliant summary by Sarah Sanders, my very loyal Press Secretary, of the great summary by Bill Barr, my wonderful Attorney General, of the very strong, very thorough report by Special Council Robert Mueller & the 13 Angry Democrats. I have to tell you, I was a little bit worried about that one. Even though they put a Republican in charge of it. Because even when we're innocent, who knows what an investigation will turn up? This one turned up NOTHING. Nil. Nada. Nichts. Zip. ZERO. Zilch. Fuck all -- No Indictments. No Criminal Conspiracy. No Cyber hacking. No Troll accounts. No Russian interference in Election. No Bad Conduct of any kind. What. So. Ever. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you, Bill. Thank you, Robert. And, hell, thank you, 13 Angry Dems (haters & loosers)!!!!

Task:
        To blink an LED.

        A blinking LED is required on a control panel to indicate
          a warning condition.
        Therefore it must be extremely reliable.

Hardware engineer:

        Easy, I'll use a 555, a few resistors and a capacitor; or LM3909 chip.
        Done. Did I win a prize?

DIY Maker:

        Easy. I'll use an Arduino with the blink sketch and a resistor.
        Done. I have more billable hours than the first guy.

Senior Software Engineer:

        You guys have it all wrong.
        Such a system would never be flexible enough for a real application
          where a blinking LED indicator is required.

        Consider the inflexibility of the 555 approach.
        What if the marketing people change the requirements from a simple
          on/off blink to a different blink pattern.
        The simplest example would be the double blink.
                Blink, Blink, long pause, Blink, Blink, etc.

        Then consider the lack of sophistication that the Arduino has.
        With a simple microcontroller you can't have a web interface
          to configure the LED's blink rate.
        You would have to re flash the firmware.

        With a more sophisticated controller, like a Raspberry PI, or
          even better, a Beagle Bone, the system could automatically
          check on the internet for software updates; and automatically
          download and apply them.
        For security, downloads could be signed with 4096 bit keys
          using private certificates from the manufacturer.
        (This also ensures ongoing contracts since no other vendor
          would have the private certificates.)
        Higher end boards provide more flexibility.
        The LED controller could have it's own WiFI connection to
          not burden the rest of the system to provide its
          internet access.
        And even better . . .

(lightning bolt strikes in mid sentence)

Epic Showcases Gorgeous Ray Tracing Unreal Engine 4 Demo Running on a Single RTX 2080Ti GPU

During yesterday’s ‘State of Unreal’ keynote at the Game Developers Conference 2019, Epic Games showcased a gorgeous ray tracing demo titled ‘Troll’. Running on a single GeForce RTX 2080Ti graphics card and made with the Unreal Engine 4.22, Troll was developed with no custom plugins or code by Goodbye Kansas and Deep Forest Films.

‘Troll’ was visually inspired by the works of Swedish painter and illustrator John Bauer, who is famous for his illustrations of Swedish folklore and fairy tales anthology ‘Among Gnomes and Trolls’. Epic’s 3Lateral took care of 3D and 4D facial scanning.

“Troll’ from Goodbye Kansas and Deep Forest Films | GDC 2019 | Unreal Engine (1m33s)

Often known as Cancer Brain McCain (RIP!!). I gave him the kind of funeral he wanted, which as President I had to approve. I don’t care about this, I didn’t get a "thank you." That’s O.K. We sent him on the way. But I wasn’t a fan. I have to be honest, I never liked him much. Hasn’t been for me. I’ve really, probably, never will.

John McCain received a fake and phony dossier. Did you hear about the dossier? It was paid for by Crooked Hillary Clinton. Right? And John McCain got it -- he got it. And what did he do? He didn’t call me. He turned it over to the F.B.I., hoping to put me in jeopardy.

I keep hearing, "oh, he was a hero." Well, he wasn't a hero. At best, half a hero. Sometimes referred to as the Six Inch. Too small to fill you up. Not too small to get shot down.

McCain didn’t get the job done for our great vets and the V.A. And they knew it. That’s why, when I had my dispute with him, I had such incredible support from the vets and from the military. The vets were on MY side because I got the job done. I got choice, and I got accountability. MAGA!! pscp.tv/w/b2KXajFvTlFsTFJub1dwUXd8MXlOR2FPWm5WZ0R4at3FMBCBSFgrQipWDpPGz9sj1AYZx6X61DtQKgz6Vqvh

AMD Ryzen 3000 CPUs Get Early BIOS Support in X370 & X470 Motherboards, Next-Gen Zen 2 Based Family Internally Codenamed as Valhalla

Also, the creator of the Ryzen DRAM calculator has listed down some new features that might be coming in the Ryzen 3000 processors with one confirming that the Ryzen 3000 series processors would indeed ship with CCD (Compute Core Design, a new name for CCX), support a maximum of 32 threads which confirms 16 core parts, following is the full list of features which were found:

1) New memory controller with partial error correction for nonECC memory
2) Desktop processor with two (2 CCD) chiplets on board, 32 threads maximum
3) New MBIST (Memory built-in self-test)
4) Core watchdog – is a fail/safe function used to reset a system in case the microprocessor gets lost due to address or data errors
5) XFR – at the moment I do not see anything special about it, the algorithm and limits have been updated. Scalar Controll come back with new processors.
6) Updated core control has a symmetric configuration of the active cores . In 2CCD configurations, each chiplet has its own RAM channel in order to minimize latency to memory access. 1 channel on 8 cores will be a bottleneck if you use the system in the default state.

Have you heard of any feature like this? Does it even matter?

If you are buying 8 GB or 16+ GB DRAM modules, do they need to be ECC?

"It doesn't make take a Genius team of investigators to realize that Collusion is a HOAX...Here we are 670 days after the Mueller Insensitive Probe and, intense as it's been, still no Collusion. None, ZERO, nothing! Yeah, it's a Witch Hunt." Sean Hannity. Thank you, Sean!!! pic.twitter.com/95I4towyEP

Some people were discussing time travel earlier and if that were possible, whether the traveler would create a new timeline, effectively a parallel universe, by their actions, or whether they would alter their existing universe with what some people consider may be paradoxical results.

One idea that occurred to me would be that a time traveler could go into the past and pick up Albert Einstein. After that they could travel back to a time, say, an hour earlier in Albert Einstein's life, before their previous arrival, and pick him up again. This could be repeated many, many times until they could open an academy full of Albert Einsteins to collaborate on all the big problems in science. Has anyone written a sci fi story about this idea? If not, they should!¹

Depending on how the causality works, it might not be a good idea for them to drop each Albert off at the academy one by one before returning to earlier and earlier moments in his past--because with each new pick-up the slightly older Alberts that were taken to the academy might cease to exist. If so, maybe it would be safer to keep all the Alberts on board the craft until the mission is complete. This might be sufficient to keep them all in the same timeline as the time traveler.

If this thought experiment is coherent then weirdly it points to a source of almost infinite energy. Just pump an oil well dry, then travel back to just enough time before the pumping began to empty it again, repeating this over and over throughout the entire history of the oil well. Weird or what?

^{1. mcgrew, I'm looking at you.}

Can somebody remind me why we should believe anything he says about the "Russia" bullshit?

No, we're not even close to "Peak Chutzpah"