SoylentNews

NVIDIA Project R.O.N Leaked – Google Home Like AI + Hologram Device

Nvidia employee takes a train, nosy nerd lands a scoop.

What will Nvidia call its Alexa?

AMD Navi 20 GPU Allegedly Supports Ray Tracing and Enhanced GCN Graphics Architecture – May End Up Being Much Faster Than RTX 2080 Ti

(for ray tracing, and a GPU that will be released long after the RTX 2000-series came out)

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 Series Receives Price Drop By Major UK Based Retailer – Custom RTX 2060 Down To £299, RTX 2070 For £419 and RTX 2080 for £599

Valve’s long-rumored VR headset is finally real: the Valve Index, coming in May

Valve just surprise revealed its own VR headset called the Valve Index

Typewriters are ancient and should be abolished. People who want to keep a typewriter should be punished by being forced to use one.

One problem with typewriters is that sometimes certain letters might not work.

This would make it difficult to understand an article explaining the difference between a 3.5 inch floppy di_{_}k and a big hard di_{_}k, versus a mi_{_}roSD   _{_}ard.

It would become almost impossible for the reader to infer what the malfunctioning letter might be.

Or multiple malfunctioning letters on some typewriters.

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

Here in the United States, the federal government and many state governments, e.g. Georgia, have tried in various ways to block the public's access to the law. Incorporating a standard as law by reference, when that standard is copyrighted, is unquestionably an act of unacceptable tyranny.

The question of how this will be dealt with raises important questions, either the copyright must dissolve and the standard must become public domain when incorporated, or the incorporation itself must be null and void.

But what if the US Courts fail to accept one of these two acceptable outcomes? The 11th Circuit seems to suggest that standards could remain copyrighted if not written at the behest of government. If that becomes law, what should the people do?

I can't begin to convince myself that the country is a free democratic republic if the laws themselves are copyrighted. I would view a loss of the public right to view, copy, and share the law as a takeover of our democracy by corporations. Is violent rebellion against copyrighted law an inevitable outcome? Is it justified? It seems like fundamentally, if we lose this fight for the right to know and share the law, that our government is tyrannical, and we would be left with no option but to to rebel violently against it, given the majority is unlikely to vote in a fix, as they care more about D vs R than the fundamentals of a free democratic republic.

What are the options on the table to stop these acts of tyranny?

P.S.
For the crazies who seem to doubt that this is actually happening, as well as the corporate shills who seem intent on misleading the public into thinking the law is more liberal than it really is, here is a good evidentiary example:

Authorship, therefore, is central to many questions that arise under the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 101 et seq. [...] In particular, we rely on the identity of the public officials who created the work, the authoritativeness of the work, and the process by which the work was created. These are critical markers. Where all three point in the direction that a work was made in the exercise of sovereign power -- which is to say where the official who created the work is entrusted with delegated sovereign authority, where the work carries authoritative weight, and where the work was created through the procedural channels in which sovereign power ordinarily flows -- it follows that the work would be attributable to the constructive authorship of the People, and therefore uncopyrightable.

(CODE REVISION COMMISSION, v.s. PUBLIC.RESOURCE.ORG, INC., No. 17-11589, 11th Circuit)
Here, the 11th Circuit makes it relatively clear that a standard, such as an electrical code, authored by a private corporation, and then incorporated into law by reference, can remain copyrighted. This is in contrast to the D.C. circuit approach (which essentially says that stating the law might be fair use of a copyrighted work) so the Supreme Court will probably have to resolve the circuit split. The more concerning thing, is that neither court explicitly stated a basic principle: that rules incorporated by reference cannot be copyrighted. Depending on the outcome, we could see copyrighted laws. Let us hope that tyranny is not allowed to continue.

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)

As I've often noted, it's sad that few people have a decent grasp of history.

Given that what has come before is both a strong indicator and a significant influence on what is now and what's to come, it seems odd that many folks choose to remain ignorant of the past.

History is vast. So much has gone before. And if the Doomsday Argument is considered valid, quite a bit is still to come.

As such, it seems to me that those with a reasonable interest in the future should also have a reasonable interest in history as well.

If one accepts that, the question becomes: "Where do I start?"

Given that SoylentNews is an English language site, most users likely live in cultures evolving from The Western Tradition. That seems like a good place to start.

The series entitled The Western Tradition^* is a personal (as Eugen Weber points out, history is inherently a personal journey) journey through the history of Western civilization.

The video series above consists of 52 half-hour episodes. That seems like a lot, but consider that the series covers many thousands of years.

As such, the series must go through all this very fast. But, as Dr. Weber points out, here in America, we do everything fast. For example, here's the history of man in four minutes or so.

Regardless, I invite you to check this out and share it with others, especially children, as it provides a good look at how we got to where we are now (and, if cogitated upon, can provide us with some clues as to where we might be going).

Do any of you have suggestions to supplement the above? Including the works of Gibbon, Spengler and Spheeris.

Also, what (if anything) has history meant to you? Has it impacted your thoughts and actions in the present and/or your ruminations about the future?

Let's discuss.

^*Updated playlist that's actually in order/complete. Thanks to Hendrikboom for calling me out on my laziness with the initial link.

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?