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Welcome to another familiar story..

Biden offers tax concession in infrastructure talks with key Republican

Of course it's not really a "cave-in". Opposing republicans was never in the plans. They're just trying out a new shade of porcine lipstick. You gonna buy some more in '22?

Concession and compromise define the DNC, it really means complicity and corruption, they only win 50% of the vote because of the GOP's insanity

It’s a terrible excuse. And we shouldn’t stand for it.

But it's a tried and true excuse, and you will stand for it, again and again, just like before. So there!

Since I moved house I now have a room for all my computers. This includes my two old Sun Ultra 80s and Sun Blade 100. I also have a K6-2/500 (512MB RAM) which started out in 1999 as a K6-2/400, and an Athlon XP 2000+ (512MB RAM) from 2002.

I decided to try NetBSD on one of the Ultra 80s and the Blade 100. Turgid jr. installed one of them, hist first time installing NetBSD, and it worked very well.

Years ago I installed Gentoo on the K6-2, and I thought I might have a got at installing a new verson on the Athlon XP. It took a while to get it going. The Gentoo 32-bit boot image is broken, so I ended up having to boot from Slackware-current to partition the disks and set up the network. I then got the stage 3 image down over http from one of my Slackware machines and set it going.

Then I had an idea. I went on Ebay to see if I could find a faster CPU for the Athlon XP machine. The XP 2000+ runs at 1.67GHz and was reasonably quick back in the day. When I compiled the Gentoo kernel, it took about 166 minutes. On Ebay, for peanuts (less than £12.50 including postage), I found an Athlon XP 2800+, which runs at 2.08GHz. I ordered it and dropped it in. I tried the kernel compile again. It only took about 114 minutest this time, an improvement of over 30%.

Someone on here kindly suggested I try setting up a compile farm for cross-compiling Gentoo on the faster machines. So I got as far as setting up VirtualBox on some of my Slackware systems and starting a Gentoo install (to be identical to the clients, for consistency and simplicity) on one of them.

One of my 64-bit Slackware machines (the ancient intel Core 2 Quad) died. The motherboard had been on its way out for months. The symptom was that it wouldn't start straight away when you pressed the power switch. Sometimes it wouldn't start at all. but sometimes it would take many tens of seconds to start. I googled that and it was probably a problem with failing capacitors. The machine had 8GB DDR-2 in it and a couple of large SATA disks, so I didn't want to waste it. I went on Ebay and managed to get, again for peanuts, a Gigabyte motherboard which came with a dual-core Pentium.

The motherboard (and CPU) worked, so I put my Core 2 Quad in it. Unfortunately it would only work with half of my RAM. I did a bit of googling and it turns out that this motherboard can't take double-sided DIMMS. So now I had a spare 4GB of DDR-2 RAM.

Then I remembered I still have my old Phenom II X4 940 (3.0GHz) in a box somewhere, and its cooler. All I needed was a case, power supply and motherboard. Back on Ebay, I got a very good deal (with a money off voucher) for a cheap and cheerful new case, a new 750W PSU and an old Asus Socket AM2+ motherboard complete with dual core Phenom II, 3.1GHz.

I put it all together, and took the disks out of the Core 2 Quad, and put a spare disk in that one. I put my old nVidia GeForec 9400GT in it and away it went, after disabling the built-in graphics, which is some kind of Radeon.

Then I was thinking about number crunching. I do some BOINC things and I really will get around to writing some OpenCL code one of these days. Graphics cards are as rare as hen's teeth these days. I have a GTX 1650 in my Ryzen, and I had a GTX 650 in my Phenom II X6 (2.7Ghz). I looked on Ebay at second hand GTX 660s and they were selling for ludicrous amounts of money (£60+) given how old they are. Then I had a brainwave. I've used nVidia Quadro graphics cards at work before, and they're not really what people who play games buy, so I had a look at that wikipedia page to see what models support which features and I figured I might be able to get a bargain on something with "CUDA Compute Capability 5.0" and Maxwell architecture. So I went back on Ebay and found some Quadro K620 cards for sale at very reasonable prices. So I bought two for the price that GTX 660s were selling for. They're up and running.

I had thought about seeing if I could upgrade the Phenom II X6 1045T (2.7GHz) to the fastest the board will take, the 1090T at 3.2GHz. It seems that these CPUs are still selling well. It would be difficult to get one for under £70 and I have run out of pocket money. The parts to get the Phenom II X4 going were less than that.

My adventures with lunatic fringe versions of Slackware (i.e. -current) continue apace and I've just set up the Core 2 Quad with current from about a week ago with kernel 5.10.38. I tried a current from two days ago with kernel 5.10.41 but that hangs on boot and gives a kernel oops apparently in the SMP code.

Living in the sticks the Internet bandwidth is rotten. I'm only getting 11Mbit/s down and about 1.2 up so I finally got around to putting a cron job on my little always-on server to do my downloads over night. I considered satellite Internet, but that's a bit too new at the moment, and I've heard that some people have had bad experiences with it.

Now that Jeff Bezos’s space flight company Blue Origin has lost a multibillion contract to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Congress is prepping the ground for Bezos to win a contract anyway, ordering NASA to make not one but two awards...

The bill is currently on the Senate floor and has broad bipartisan support. A procedural vote last week passed by a 71-27 margin...

Blue Origin spent $625,000 lobbying the Senate in the first three months of 2021, according to lobbying disclosure records...

Meanwhile, the fight over the NASA contract is the latest development in the growing contest between two of the world’s richest men for government contracts.

See? Bipartisanship where it's really needed. That's the spirit. Neither faction has the smallest problem handing billions over to these guys.

This time there are some specs.

That Lenovo tablet with HDMI input is official, and it's a monster media machine

The chunky 13-inch tablet uses a 2K resolution, 16:10 aspect ratio LCD screen, and an aluminum body with a bit of Alcantra trim. Underneath is a Snapdragon 870, a surprisingly high-end processor for a tablet, paired with a generous 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. The rear seems to go without any kind of camera (which makes sense: when's the last time you needed a tablet for photos and didn't have a much better smartphone nearby?) but it has an 8MP front-facing camera with face unlock.

[...] As of now, the Yoga Pad Pro is only confirmed for the Chinese market, where it goes on sale May 31st for 3299 yuan (a little more than $500 USD). Whether Lenovo will release it internationally is anyone's guess; the company's Tab P11 Pro is in the same range, but with a much tighter focus on work, not entertainment.

It would be nice to eventually see this capability come to all tablets (including budget landfill tier and smaller sizes), with either a microHDMI or USB-C port.

No, wait, this time it was Biden, like always, in second place, just doing what he's told..

Today, yesterday, what's the difference? Same excuses to the letter. The pendulum barely moves.

SNAFU

EDIT:

And of course, instead of killing the filibuster, democrats would much rather continue to use republican "obstruction" as an excuse, while the blame game continues to play well to their audience.

And Biden lets DeJoy continue to ruin the post office

Setting up to repeat 2010

EDIT 2:

President Joe Manchin addresses the nation

John Cena Shows ‘Gutlessness’ In Apology To China, Critics Say

Movie star and pro wrestler John Cena was taken to the mat by critics Tuesday for apologizing to China after he called Taiwan a country in an interview.

Cena told Taiwanese media that Taiwan would be the first “country” to be able to see his new “Fast and Furious” film “F9,” prompting backlash in China, which considers the self-ruled democratic island nation its own territory, The Associated Press reported. China often takes suggestions of Taiwan independence as an insult.

“In one interview, I made a mistake,” Cena said in Mandarin in a video posted Tuesday to Chinese social media, per AP. “I need to say now that this is very, very, very, very, very important. I love and respect China and the Chinese people. I’m very, very sorry. As for my mistake, I really apologize for it.”

Video of John Cena apologizing in Mandarin.

Taiwan vs. West Taiwan.

AMD AM5 Next-Gen Desktop Platform Details Leak Out – Zen 4 Ryzen CPU Support, LGA 1718 Socket, Dual-Channel DDR5 Memory

Switching from PGA to LGA.

Sounds like it will have larger dimensions. Edit: nope.

No surprise extra memory channels.

PCIe 4.0 on Zen 4 Ryzen, no PCIe 5.0 yet (as if that even matters).

AMD Ryzen 6000 notebook roadmap leaks, 6nm Rembrandt with Zen3+ and Navi2 in 2022

This could be an older roadmap, as Van Gogh is considered (pre-)cancelled. Maybe AMD doesn't want to launch something with half the cores but better gaming performance than Cezanne.

Next year, Rembrandt and Dragon Crest with RDNA 2 graphics. Barcelo is a Cezanne refresh, like Lucienne is for Renoir.

TMB sez, "Miss me now?"