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Surface Laptop 3 Specifications Mention Unreleased AMD Octa-Core CPUs & up to 16GB RAM

Rather than the chiplets used by other Zen 2 CPUs, this is likely to be a monolithic die. Graphics is probably Vega, not Navi. I have an aging AMD quad-core APU that would be blown out of the water by an 8-core Zen 2 Renoir.

I wouldn't pay much attention to the prices, that's just Microsoft emulating Apple.

Finally, this is worth a look:

Not worth it: AMD Ryzen 7 3750H is only 4 to 8 percent faster than the Ryzen 5 3550H

Ryzen 5 3550H = 8497 multi, 1886 single.
Ryzen 7 3750H = 9051 multi, 1962 single.

+6.5% multi, +4% single. Bad segmentation.

The chips aren't bad but Intel's do about the same (but better single-threaded) at lower TDPs, and Intel has options like the 6-core i7-9750H in $1,100+ laptops, or the 8-core i9-9880H in $1,800-$3,000 laptops. AMD Renoir could bring those core counts down to earth, and trade blows with Ice Lake.

We have to take our stupid war

I wonder if the rest of the galaxy should be grateful that they're still out of reach, or if they're just like us, and we should be grateful to be out of their reach

Best quote of the day: (Emphasis mine)

J.King Ars Scholae Palatinae et Subscriptor
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Sep 20, 2019 10:12 PM

        Popular

Kruskal-Szekeres wrote:
If, after all these years and revelations about FB, you still use FB... you deserve FB.

Unfortunately, whether or not you even use it doesn't seem to matter all that much. They'll still collect information about, and leak data about you via people you know.
  +56 (+58 / -2)

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/facebook-suspends-tens-of-thousands-of-apps-in-ongoing-privacy-investigation/

[Update: 22 September 2019 2056 GMT]

Writing this journal made me think more about what the issues with building LineageOS for my phone entailed. As I mentioned, it's primarily an integration issue. As such, I reviewed the hardware specific Github repos I was using and noted that some of the hardware specific repos (android_device_htc_t6-common, android_device_htc_msm8960-common and android_device_htc_t6vzw) were being pulled from the LineageOS 14.1 branch (the last supported branch for my phone). So I changed the repos to pull from the only project I'm aware of that supports my phone under 15.1 (ResurrectionRemix, with repos from developer TARKZiM.

Et voila! LineageOS 15.1 now compiles (well, except for an initial error that the recovery image -- which I'm not using, I use TWRP instead) complained that it was too large for my recovery partition. Since I'm not using that recovery image anyway, increasing the allowed size of the recovery image got rid of that error.

I now have an installable rom for LineageOS 15.1. Sadly, it hangs on boot, without even the boot image animation being displayed. :( Logcat debugging is called for now, to determine what may be preventing the image from booting.

In the meantime, I'm convinced that further integration is required. It appears that TARKZiM, as well as the TWRP folks have moved to a universal codebase for the HTC One Max (t6-Univ) and I'm guessing I'm going to need to integrate that into my device tree.

I'll continue updating as things move (or don't) along.
[End Update 22 September 2019 2056 GMT]

So I have an HTC One Max (VZW version) that's served me pretty well for more than five years.

When I bought it back in 2014, I chose it over the HTC One and other phones for several reasons:
1. Big screen (5.9"/1080p support -- not that I watch video on it)
2. Extra battery life compared to other phones
3. External SDCard slot (I keep ~60GB of music on that)

It shipped with HTC's stock Android 4.4.2 (KitKat), along with HTC's bloatware and a few nice utilities.

In September, 2015 HTC released the *last* update (still 4.4) for the One Max and declared that it would not support future versions of Android on it.

For quite some time, I'd been annoyed that I didn't have access to the more granular permissions in Marshmallow and investigated custom roms for my phone.

I installed Cyanogenmod (now LineageOS) and really liked it. However, it did not have support for either the IR blaster or the fingerprint scanner on the One Max.

This led me to go back to the stock rom, as I was using both of them on a regular basis.

On a fairly regular basis, I'd check in on LineageOS development and see if the IR/fingerprint functionality was available.

Then it happened. LineageOS stopped supporting my phone after v14.1. Still with no IR/fingerprint sensor support.

Finally, a few months ago, I got so sick of the lack of features in my stock rom, I went looking around for new custom roms that support my phone. There wasn't much out there.

I poked around the forums on https://www.xda-developers.com/ and found very little in the way of stuff I could use.

Then I decided to see if I could port my phone to LineageOS myself. I started with LineageOS 15.1 (Android 8 Oreo) and failed miserably. Mostly because I had no experience with Android development.

So I went back and attempted to build the most recent version that was supported (LineageOS 14.1) and successfully built that.

I then went back to LineageOS 15.1 and tried again. It still failed. I did a ton of research and realized that the issues I was seeing were related to the hardware (t6vzw/msm8960) code (from 14.1) I was using wasn't compatible with the newer android version.

More research and I determined that this stuff isn't just poorly documented, discussions about porting and references to specific resources to assist were mostly non-existent.

It was around this time I discovered ResurrectionRemix (based on LineageOS) which *does* support my phone, With Android 7, 8 and 9.

I installed various versions, and they do, in fact, work on my phone. Currently, I have RR 7.0.2 (Android 9 pie) running on my phone.

But RR eats the battery much faster than the stock rom or the older versions of LineageOS. What's more, Wifi and cellular signals are not as strong as in supported versions. Even worse, there's an RRStats app that sends usage information back to the RR folks, and that cannot be removed or uninstalled. Assholes.

As such, I am continuing to try to build LineageOS for my phone. As many of you are aware, this requires an iterative approach:

1. Assemble the various code repos required;
2. Attempt the build;
3. Address any errors that cause the build to fail;
4. Go to (2) until the build completes successfully;
5. Profit!

I'm continuing with (2) and (3) and have addressed a bunch of problems. The issues I'm seeing now appear to be related to android API changes causing missing/malformed definitions.

One of the mechanisms I've used to address this is to use the Android version hardware specific code from builds (in this case, Resurrection Remix) that do support my hardware. This has helped considerably and the build goes much farther.

I'm currently stuck on some C++ definition errors ('member reference base type...is not a structure or union') which certainly shouldn't be too hard to address. I suspect that this is an integration issue, as the errors I'm seeing are in the hardware-specific code that I ripped from RR and am trying to build LineageOS.

I am emphatically *not* asking for coding assistance, as I want to work these issues out myself, but feel free to make suggestions and/or point me at resources that might give me some ideas as to how to address such integration issues.

Note that I'm not a developer by trade (rather I'm Unix/Linux guy from way back in the 90s, so I'm no stranger to building software and doing some debugging), so this has been and will continue to be a nice learning (C++, possibly some Java) experience for me.

Have other Soylentils engaged in this sort of project? I'd be interested to hear about your experiences and would appreciate suggestions and pointers to reference material that might help.

Feel free to chime in on the wasteland that is software support for phones older than two years and/or other Android ecosystem issues too.

Can Congress defund them for it? If they can, but they haven't, it can only mean they truly are complicit. Which nobody should doubt anyway.

But I also understand the fear of discovery. It would reveal that Sr. Presidente isn't doing anything out of the ordinary. And none of this is going to affect the vote anyway. The Party will still get its 95% no matter what.

And Poor old Joe. He has to spend the rest of his campaign denying that he *fucks pigs* (a "Fear and Loathing" thing). Damn near feel sorry for the SOB.

Just show his press conferences raw and uncut. The takeaway is:

...watching just one press conference from Otay Mesa helped me understand how the process of reporting about this president can mask and normalise his full and alarming incoherence.

Expose a little of this, and you just might make the sale.

Oh, and misprision is a word. Something you see every day in your elected government. Which means, the problem is not intractable. In fact, the solution is most trivial.

'Shallow' hit-maker Mark Ronson puts brains before looks as he comes out as sapiosexual

Chart-topper Mark Ronson has come out as sapiosexual. In case you're not familiar with the term, it means being attracted to intelligence above other traits -- or, in other words, putting brains before looks or gender.

Ronson, 44, is known for a string of successful collaborations with A-list artists from Amy Winehouse and Adele to Miley Cyrus. This year, he won the Oscar for Best Original Song with "Shallow," interpreted by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper in Hollywood's latest reimagining of "A Star Is Born."

Speaking on ITV's Good Morning Britain on Thursday, he said: "I feel like I identify as sapiosexual." Anchors Ben Shephard and Kate Garraway congratulated him on being "out and proud."

Author Nichi Hodgson appeared on the show earlier, defending the term. "The definition of sapiosexuality means intelligence first," she said. "I have dated men, women, transmen, transwomen, and across the gender spectrum and identify now as bisexual," she added. "The thing that has linked all these people has been their brains."

[...] "It's always existed, we just didn't have a word for it," she said.

Brain in a vat, that's how I like 'em.

Sanders campaign wracked by dissension

Elizabeth Warren just won an endorsement that’s making Bernie Sanders’s world really mad

According to polls, Warren needs a little more to fully absorb Sanders.