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Radxa Zero SBC – A powerful quad-core alternative to Raspberry Pi Zero W

Better than Raspberry Pi 3B+ performance in the Zero form factor, USB-C ports instead of Micro-USB, up to 4 GB LPDDR4 RAM (but as low as 512 MB), upgrade to 8-16 GB eMMC w/ more RAM, upgrade to a better wireless module w/ more RAM. Ranging from $15 to $45.

The only complaints I could have: (possibly) no display over USB-C, no AV1 decode in the Amlogic S905Y2.

Then you have to wonder about the heat of running a 2 GHz quad-core in there. It might need something like this, if not active cooling.

Last year, I was doing a bit of soul-searching regarding where I'd got to in my career (careering from disaster to disaster) and I found myself frustrated (particularly by PHBs and corporate inertia), perhaps part of an on-going midlife crisis. So I looked for a new job and miraculously got one.

Now I am the PHB, at a different company with a completely different culture and absolutely no C++ (hooray). I am learning new things too, which is always good.

I have already found that my ability to obfuscate with grand yet vacuous prose has come in useful. I'm also spending a lot of time doing analysis and planning, and "communicating" with project managers and senior people in the company. Some days have been entirely filled with meetings. I feel a bit guilty. It doesn't feel like "proper work."

Of course, being a PHB means being ignorant, smug and vindictive, so these are traits that I am keen to hone and apply to my team going forward. I will sit back and stare at Microsoft(TM) Excel(R) spreadsheets while the enthusiastic and intellingent young engineers in my control are ruthlessly exploited, having their natural enthusiasm beaten out of them until they are no longer of use and can be discarded.

That's the plan.

However, as it says in the Tao of Programming

Thus spake the Master Programmer:
"After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless."

I like to write code at home. I have various silly projects that I work on from time to time. I do a lot of shell scripting, since that gives the biggest bang for the buck, but I also like to write C. I'm really struggling to get into it at the moment. I find that being a PHB my brain is all "visionary leadership" and "ideas" and I can't quieten down the internal noise long enough to write any code worth it.

This weekend I think I have managed to write about 20 lines of code. Every time I sit down to do it, my brain goes off on a tangent.

Intel allegedly planning Raptor Lake CPUs with 24 cores and Alder Lake HX series for enthusiast notebook series

"Lakefield" was the beta test. All Intel microarchitectures for the foreseeable future will support hybrid/heterogeneous cores, starting with Alder Lake. "Windows 11" will launch before Alder Lake with support for big/small core scheduling.

Big Golden Cove cores will bring around a +20% single threaded performance improvement over Tiger Lake (Willow Cove). Small Gracemont Atom cores will be lower clocked cores with around Skylake's IPC and no hyperthreading, but about four of them can fit in the die area taken up by one Golden Cove core.

Launch around October 25 with Alder Lake desktop CPUs first:

Core i9 (K) = 8 big, 8 small
Core i7 (K) = 8 big, 4 small
Core i5 (K) = 6 big, 4 small

More launched in Q1 2022:

Core i9/i7 non-K (as above)
Core i5 (non-K) = 6 big, 0 small
Core i3 (non-K) = 4 big, 0 small

Around late 2022, Intel will launch Raptor Lake with big "Raptor Cove" cores (minor IPC, frequency, and performance/Watt improvements), and the same Gracemont cores. Except it will include up to 16 of them. So the top CPU will have 8 big, 16 small, i.e. 24 cores, 32 threads.

After that, Meteor Lake will transition to Intel's "7nm" node and use an MCM/chiplet design.

AMD could use Zen 3 with 3D L3 cache to compete with Alder Lake.

Zen 4 "Raphael" is considered pushed back to late 2022. AMD may have been planning to launch with only up to 16 cores (two 8-core chiplets again), but may decide to add a third chiplet for 24 cores.

The White House announced Friday that President Biden hopes to shut down the prison at the Naval Station Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, a tall task that the Obama administration failed to do nearly a decade ago.

"We are undertaking an NSC process to assess the current state of play that the Biden administration has inherited from the previous administration, in line with our broader goal of closing Guantanamo," she said. "There will be a robust interagency process to move forward on this, but we need to have the right people seated to do this important work."

Former President Barack Obama said the detention center went against American values and was a "stain on our broader record" when he argued for the prison's closure in 2016, NPR reported.

Later that same year, then-President-elect Donald Trump vowed to keep the installation open.

"We're gonna load it up with some bad dudes, believe me," Trump said in 2016.

Biden Administration Aims To Close Guantanamo Bay Prison

I Am Eternally In Your Debt. --Michael David Crawford

Bill Gates’ Former Employees Are Starting to Open Up About More Alleged Affairs in the Workplace

Details in the Bill and Melinda Gates’ divorce are about to get a bit more complicated. It seems that their 27-year marriage wasn’t the fairy-tale romance we had been led to believe, per sources that have spoke to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and now Vanity Fair. According to former employees of the Microsoft founder and other unnamed sources, it appears that many of Gates’ professional contacts often crossed the line into “inappropriate extramarital relationship[s]” with Vanity Fair sources now claiming this conduct was an “open secret” at work.

Information about one affair of Gates’ was already well-known before his divorce led to further digging into his marital past: a 2001 affair with an employee into which Microsoft conducted an investigation before Gates stepped down from the board in 2019. But according to Gates’ former employees speaking up to Vanity Fair now, it appears there was more than one alleged entanglement between Gates and his employees. His behavior was considered “something of an open secret” at the corporation, per these sources. One former employee, who signed an NDA, shared that “there were times when Bill came into the office driving a Mercedes, and an hour later, one of his security personnel showed up with a golden brown Porsche that Bill drove away in” — like a sneaky getaway vehicle to romance his latest mistress.

Bill Gates' affairs were an open secret, and someone in Melinda's inner circle hired a private investigator before she filed for divorce, report says

Two sources also told Vanity Fair that someone in French Gates' inner circle had worked with a private investigator leading up to the divorce.

A spokesperson for French Gates told Insider that "neither Melinda nor anyone at her direction ever hired a private investigator."

In a statement responding to the Vanity Fair article, a spokesperson for Bill Gates told Insider: "It is extremely disappointing that there have been so many untruths published about the cause, the circumstances, and the timeline of Bill Gates's divorce."

"The rumors and speculation are becoming increasingly absurd and it's unfortunate that people who have little to no knowledge of the situation are being characterized as 'sources.'"

The Good Law Project has been doing a good job in recent years of holding our corrupt and mendacious Alt-Wrong (ERG/Faragist) infested Tory government to account, particularly for contracts awarded to friends, acquaintances and others connected with the Conservative Party, to provide public services, including for the procurement of PPE for the Coronavirus epidemic.

It seems that the Alt-Wrong apologist press, this time the Mail on Sunday, is picking on the Good Law Project, accusing it of "abusing" crowd funding.

From the Good Law Project website:

The Courts have repeatedly complimented us for our conduct. In our challenge over the Hanbury contract handed to associates of Dominic Cummings, the Judge said she was satisfied that we are managing our cases and funds in an appropriate way. In another hearing the Judge said: “All citizens are likely to have an interest in whether or not the procurement on the part of the government is done using good governance procedures and integrity. And therefore there is a real wider public interest that has been represented by the claimant group…”

Like all good bullies, the Mail on Sunday is attacking the messenger, not the message, and making things up.

The Pentagon on Tuesday reached the midpoint in its herculean task of withdrawing troops and equipment out of Afghanistan.

The U.S. military has removed the equivalent of approximately 500 loads of material flown out of the country by large cargo aircraft, according to an update from U.S. Central Command.

Approximately 13,000 pieces of equipment that will not be left to the Afghan military have also been handed over to the Defense Logistics Agency for destruction. The U.S. has officially handed over six facilities to the Afghan military.

In April, Biden announced a full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, which would end America’s longest war.

Biden’s withdrawal timeline breaks with a proposed deadline brokered last year by the Trump administration with the Taliban. According to that deal, all foreign forces would have had to leave Afghanistan by May 1.

U.S. forces are halfway through their withdrawal from Afghanistan

At last I have a sea-going vessel of my own. Someone gave me an old inflatable dinghy, a 2.4m tender. It has oars, but no rowlocks.

A few years ago, I noticed I was losing my sense of balance. I used to be able to stand up on the gunwales of my dad's small yacht when it was heeling over, with my hands in my pockets, looking nonchalantly out to sea. A couple of years ago, some strange things started to happen. I got shaky and weak in places. I find it quite hard to stand up on the boat now.

I'm very proud of never having fallen off a boat in my life, and when I took the dinghy sailing course a couple of years ago, I let them know that I considered it undignified and that I wouldn't be capsizing. I was the only one who finished the Level 1 course without capsizing.

Level 2 was a bit different. I did capsize once while practising on the lake, and doing the Level 2 course, there was plenty of capsizing, some of it deliberate since the instructor wanted to see us recovering.

My own sea-going vessel was given to Mrs Turgid by someone who knew that I had a passing interest in such things. Turgid Sr. was keen to see it, so he, I and cousin Mitch took it down to the harbour one evening to try it out. We pumped it up and then noticed that it didn't have any rowlocks for the two oars. Undaunted, out I went in it, an oar in each had used as a paddle. I got a few metres from the slipway where the water was a couple of metres deep and made it back to the shore.

Unfortunately for the on-lookers, there was no capsizing and I didn't get wet, despite my increasingly decrepit state and lack of physical fitness.

Living in the countryside, and being next to the sea is great. When we moved in, I planted a few rows of potatoes, and then some more a few weeks later, most of which are through now. I've also caught a few fish.

Yesterday Turgid Sr. and I went cycling up into the hills. He is a cheat: his bike has an electric motor. Mine doesn't. It was a 12-mile round trip, the first half being up hill a total of over 640ft (200m) mostly on bumpy gravel tracks. I puffed and wheezed, took copious quantities of Salbutamol, but I made it. The scenery was stunning. My legs were like lead at the end of it.

I need some rowlocks for my boat, possibly a small outboard motor, and a fishing rod. And a crate of beer.

Definitely a good look! Republicans to start using the same cyanide gas the Nazis used at Auschwitz. That'll show how pro-life and definitely not-fascist they are!

Arizona is taking steps to use hydrogen cyanide, the deadly gas used during the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis at Auschwitz and other extermination camps, to kill inmates on death row.

Corrections officials have refurbished a gas chamber that hasn’t been used in more than 20 years and have procured ingredients for the lethal gas, also known as Zyklon B, according to partially redacted documents obtained by the Guardian. Invoices show that the state purchased a brick of potassium cyanide, sodium hydroxide pellets and sulfuric acid, and a report details the considerable efforts taken to deem the gas chamber at a prison in Florence, Ariz., “operationally ready.”

Critics of the gas method say that in addition to hydrogen cyanide’s infamous use in the mass killings of Jewish people by the Nazis, it has produced some of the most botched, disturbing executions in the United States.

In Arizona, where 115 inmates are on death row, hydrogen cyanide has been deployed before. The state has killed 37 people with lethal gas, most before 1950. Since the U.S. Supreme Court lifted its moratorium on the death penalty in 1976, the state has executed two inmates with gas, most recently in 1999, according to state records.

In those cases, witnesses recounted excruciating deaths.

Convicted murderer Don Eugene Harding, who was put to death in 1992, was red-faced and gasping to breathe, his attorney James J. Belanger detailed in a written declaration. As the white fumes enveloped him, Harding twitched and jerked for minutes, longer than Belanger anticipated, the attorney wrote.

“They were the most excoriatingly painful eight minutes of my life,” Belanger wrote.

The 1999 execution of German national Walter LaGrand, who was convicted of armed robbery, took even longer, a witness noted in an account published in the Tucson Citizen. LaGrand died 18 minutes after cyanide pellets were dropped into acid below his chair, enveloping him in a mist of deadly vapor that rose, “much like steam in a shower,” the witness wrote.

After LaGrand coughed violently and fell forward, his back continued to rise and fall with shallow breaths and his head twitched for minutes before he was declared dead, according to the account.

Arizona plans to execute prisoners with a lethal gas the Nazis used at Auschwitz