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DJI Mavic 3 Pro Cine Review: A Movie Studio in the Sky
Adam Savage tests whether his Iron Man suit is bulletproof (video)
Adam Savage built an impressive replica of Tony Stark's Iron Man suit. It's fashioned from titanium which delights Adam to no end. Is it bulletproof though?
"If it is," Adam says, "well, then it has crossed that divide from costume to real armor." — Read the rest
All Calories are Created Equal? Your Gut Microbes Don't Think So
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Don't Baby Your Eggs, Coddle Them
Out of all the different ways one can cook an egg, poaching gives people the most trouble. Poaching an egg isn’t impossible, but there is a steep learning curve, despite a lot of little tricks designed to make the task easier (a clear indication it’s not that easy in the first place). Poached eggs need to be coddled,…
Crooks Are Using CAN Injection Attacks To Steal Cars
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
All the US Presidents as Comic Book Villains
32. Franklin D. Roosevelt pic.twitter.com/TfUJhpVh02
— Cam Harless (@hamcarless) March 21, 2023
If you got a kick out of Cam Harless' Gallery of US Presidents with Mullets, you're going to love his latest project. Presumably with the help of an artificial intelligence image generator, he has made comic book characters out of our presidents. Supervillains, to be exact. You'll love seeing Barack Obama as the Joker, Abraham Lincoln as a zombie, and others as various mad scientists, robots, aliens, warlocks, demons, butchers, and clowns. Since Grover Cleveland served two non-consecutive terms, he gets to be both Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. I love how Franklin Roosevelt's wheelchair was incorporated into his supervillain persona. And although I never thought Calvin Coolidge looked anything like Edgar Allan Poe, it works in a comic book universe. It's still impossible to make Jimmy Carter look evil.
Thanks!
— Miss Cellania (@misscellania) March 21, 2023
See all 46 presidents plus a bonus Ben Franklin as comic book villains at Twitter. Or at Threadreader, if you prefer. -via Fark
A Strange Pumpkin-Orange Full Moon Rises in the Sky Tonight
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Video Game Prescribed By Doctors To Treat ADHD
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How Much Garden You Would Need to 100% Survive On
Gardening is often pitched as a relaxing, therapeutic activity—and it is relaxing and therapeutic! But it’s also a sign of how advanced society has become that we can regard growing food as a charming hobby instead of an absolute necessity. On the one hand, that’s a clear sign of mankind’s mastery over the world. On…
An Alternative To Concrete
The search for eco-friendly materials, which we can use to build eco-friendly stuff, goes on as we try to solve the problem of climate change, and it seems that mushrooms are going to be of great help in our quest.
Mushrooms are helping architects and engineers solve one the world’s biggest crises: climate change. These fungi are durable, biodegradable, and are proving to be a good alternative to more polluting materials.
Materials made with mycelium, the fungal network from which mushrooms grow, might be able to help turn that around. They produce far less planet-heating carbon dioxide than traditional materials like cement. An added bonus is that mushrooms are biodegradable, so they leave behind less harmful waste than traditional building materials. Mushrooms can even help with clean-up efforts, feeding off things that might have otherwise ended up in a landfill, like sawdust or agricultural waste.
While materials made from mushrooms are still in the early stages of development, they’re already showing some promise as an insulation material and as an alternative to concrete blocks. And how do they perform? The Verge documents it in this video.
(Image Credit: The Verge/ YouTube)
Amazon, Amex To Fund Software Developers in New GitHub Program
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Flour wins in this table listing foods by calories per dollar
If 2020 has you pinching pennies, this site listing foods by calories per dollar may be helpful.
Engineer Michael Kirk says he was inspired to create the list after calculating cost per calorie of fast foods. He notes, "We think we know what food costs, but we have no idea what nutrition costs. We needed a way to value food."
The clear winner is wheat flour, which is also the winner in protein per dollar. If you'd rather not eat dry flour because it's a nice way to get salmonella, cheap white bread is not too bad for foods that require no prep. Slap some peanut butter on there and you have two top items in one delicious sandwich.
Image: Kaboompics
The Lincoln Project turns Trump's disastrous Fox interview into a Seinfeld parody
No re-election for you pic.twitter.com/cKkevBNYln
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) July 21, 2020
The Lincoln Project knows how to get under Trump's monomolecular skin. Its latest video, which uses clips from Trump's dumpster fire Fox interview, was edited into an episode of Trumpfeld, complete with laugh track.
Purism Librem Mini is a Tiny Linux Desktop
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I Monitor My Teens' Electronics, and You Should Too
Don't Give People Presents That Are Actually Chores
If you’re getting started on your holiday shopping this weekend, here’s a tip: ask yourself whether you’re giving the recipient something they truly want, or something that will add extra work to their life.
RISC-V: Why The ISA Battles Aren’t Over Yet
A computer processor uses a so-called Instruction Set Architecture to talk with the world outside of its own circuitry. This ISA consists of a number of instructions, which essentially define the functionality of that processor, which explains why so many ISAs still exist today. It’s hard to find that one ISA that works for as many distinct use cases as possible, after all.
A fairly new ISA is RISC-V, the first version of which was created back in 2010 at the University of California, Berkeley. Intended to be a fully open ISA, targeting both students (as a learning tool) and industrial users, it is claimed to incorporate a number of design choices that should make it more attractive for a number of applications.
In this article I’ll take a look behind the marketing to take stock of how exactly RISC-V differs from other open ISAs, including Power, SPARC and MIPS.
Welcome to the World of RISC
A Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) is a type of ISA which focuses on creating an instruction set that requires only a limited number of processor cycles to execute a single instruction. Ideally, an instruction would take exactly one cycle. This is in contrast to a Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC), which focuses on reducing the number of instructions needed for an application, which decreases code storage requirements.
These days CISC is essentially no more, with the Motorola m68k ISA put out to pasture, and any CPU based on Intel’s x86 CISC ISA and successors (like AMD’s 64-bit extensions) being internally a RISC processor with a CISC ISA decoder front-end that breaks CISC instructions into the RISC instructions (micro-opcodes) for its CPU core. At least as far as the CISC versus RISC ISA wars go, here we can say that RISC decidedly won.
Many flavors of RISC
Though RISC ISAs such as Alpha and PA-RISC met their unfortunate demise due to corporate policies rather than any inadequacies in their ISA design itself, we’re fortunately still left with a healthy collection of RISC ISAs today, most notably:
- SuperH (with open J-2 implementation).
- ARM (fully proprietary)
- MIPS (open, royalty-free)
- Power (open, royalty-free)
- AVR (proprietary)
- SPARC (open, royalty-free)
- OpenRISC (open, royalty-free)
RISC-V as a newcomer places its 9 years of (academic) development against the 34+ years of MIPS, 33+ years of SPARC, and the Power ISA which has its roots in development IBM did back in the early 1970s. Considering the hype around this new ISA, there must be something different about it.
This also considering that OpenRISC, which was developed with many of the same goals as RISC-V back in 2000, never made much of a splash, even though it is being used commercially.
A Shifting Landscape
It’s important to note that back in 2010 when RISC-V was being developed, SPARC had been an open ISA for a long time, with ESA’s LEON SPARC implementation in VHDL having been available since 1997. Since 2010, MIPS and IBM’s Power ISA have also joined the ranks of open and royalty-free ISAs, with open source designs in Verilog, VHDL and others made available. MIPS has been a standard teaching tool for processor ISAs since the 1990s (usually based on DLX), with many students writing their own minimalistic MIPS core as part of their curriculum.
Because of the existing contenders in these areas, RISC-V cannot simply distinguish itself by being open, royalty-free, having a more mature ISA, or better freely available HDL cores. Instead its ISA must have features that make it attractive from the standpoint of power efficiency or other metrics, allowing it to process data more efficiently or faster than the competition.
Here one defining characteristic is that the RISC-V ISA isn’t a singular ISA, but over 20 individual ISAs, each focusing on a specific set of functionality, such as bit manipulation, user-level interrupts, atomic instructions, single- and double-precision floating point, integer multiplication and division, and so on. Also interesting in the RISC-V ecosystem is that adding custom instruction sets without any kind of approval process is encouraged.
Ignoring the Future
One interesting choice in the RISC-V ISA itself is in the subroutine calls and conditions, with RISC-V having no provision for a condition code register (status register), or a carry bit. This choice makes predication impossible, instead forcing the processor to execute every single branch in the expectation that one of them is correct, discarding the results of the other branches. As branch prediction is optional in RISC-V, this could come with a big performance and energy cost penalty.
Since every other major architecture uses predication to improve performance especially for blocks of shorter jumps, such as that produced by a big if/else block or switch statement, it’s quite daring to omit this feature. The provided design rationale by the RISC-V developers is that fast, out-of-order CPUs can overcome this limitation through brute processing force. Interestingly, they do not see the larger code size produced for code without predication to be an issue, despite being proud of their compact instructions being generally quite compact.
Here the somewhat schizophrenic nature of the RISC-V development process begins to shine through. Though it’s supposed to be a good fit for embedded, presumably low-clocked processors, its lack of predication will likely hurt it here in raw performance compared to equivalent ARM-based microcontrollers, whose Thumb-2 compact instruction set is also more efficient than the RISC-V compact ISA.
Choosing Uncertainty Over Certainty with RISC-V
At this point, the only parts of the RISC-V ISA which are ‘frozen’ – meaning that they can be implemented without any fundamental changes expected – are the Base Integer sets for the 32- and 64-bit version, as well as the extensions for integer multiplication and division, atomics, single- and double-precision floating point, as well as quad-precision floating point and compressed instructions.
Extensions such as the hypervisor, bit manipulation, transactional memory, and user-level interrupts are still in flux and thus unsuitable for anything but experimental use, further fragmenting the whole RISC-V ecosystem. This clearly shows that RISC-V isn’t a ‘finished’ ISA, but still very much in the early stages of development. While its core is usable, the embedded instruction set isn’t finished either, and there’s no readily available performance data to back up claims that it can handily outperform any competition.
Worse is probably the immaturity of the available HDL cores and software tools for RISC-V. With the stabilization of the ISA sets taking time, it’s no surprise that few cores and tools offer or expect anything beyond the basic (RV32I or RV64I) functionality. Without many more ISA sets being finished and incorporated into silicon, to a bystander there’s the interesting thought that maybe the major contribution of RISC-V to this renewed ISA war isn’t that of RISC-V being necessarily superior, or it even having any long-term commercial viability.
Showing How It’s To Be Done
Back in 2000 when the OpenRISC project took off, it appeared that the market didn’t quite have the appetite for open and freely available ISAs and associated processor designs. Today that seems to be quite different, and it was RISC-V, not OpenRISC that kicked off this change in corporate thinking that caused IBM to open up its Power ISA, along with the MIPS ISA and even the ARM ISA to a limited extent. RISC-V having DARPA funding when OpenRISC did not probably played a role here too, but who is counting?
Regardless of such details, it seems that the computer hardware industry has embarked on a new path, one where even a hobbyist has access to a number of well-supported HDL cores and is free to experiment with the ISA. Right now one can pick between fully open MIPS, SPARC, Power, RISC-V, and SuperH cores, with maybe some day a fully open ARM core becoming reality as well.
In some ways it evokes flashbacks to the 1980s, when amidst the rapidly growing home computer market, multiple CPU manufacturers struggled to make their ISA and their chips to be the most popular, with Zilog’s Z80 and of course the 6502 being strong 8-bit contenders before a little upstart called ‘Intel’ began to make inroads, culminating in the seemingly complete disappearance of ISA diversity on the desktop and most recently in video consoles.
Here’s to Diversity
I wouldn’t go so far as to say I have a longing for the days of dissimilar platforms (lest someone call me a daft bastard). Anyone working in the software industry during the formative years of personal computing will find themselves regressing through the traumatic memories of porting software between the Commodore 64 and ZX-Spectrum. Thinking that we have it so much better now is not such an extreme position to take.
That said, everyone with a sense of what competition means can see that a world with only Intel, or only AMD, or only ARM, or only RISC-V processors in everything would be rather dull indeed. It is the bouncing off of ideas, of comparing differences, that keeps people thinking and that keeps innovation going. Modern software practices should mean that cross-platform compatibility isn’t as much of an issue as it was back in the 1980s and 1990s.
Here’s to an open, diverse future in the world of ISAs.
The True Cost of Multimeters
If you are building a home shop, it is common to try to get the cheapest gear you can possibly get. However, professionals often look at TCO or total cost of ownership. Buying a cheap car, for example, can cost more in the long run compared to buying an expensive car that requires less maintenance. Most consumers will nod sagely and think of ink jet printers. That $20 printer with the $80 cartridges might not be such a deal after all. [JohnAudioTech] bought a few cheap multimeters and now has problems with each of them. Maybe that $120 meter isn’t such a bad deal, after all.
The problems he’s seen are the same ones we’ve all seen: noisy selector switches, suspect display readings, and worn off lettering. You can see the whole story in the video below.
Although we get that [John] has $90 worth of meters that are not so great, we wish he’d given us an idea of one that he used that he did like. If you shop, though, you can get one really good meter for the cost of the three meters in the video and some of those will reliably last for decades.
There are cheaper meters, of course (with strange connections to felines). You can even get a Fluke meter for less than you might think.
Hexagons – The Crazy New Breadboard
A breadboard is a great prototyping tool for verifying the sanity of a circuit design before taking the painstaking effort of soldering it all together permanently. After all, a mistake in this stage can cost a lot of time and possibly material, so it’s important to get it right. [daverowntree] wasn’t fully satisfied with the standard breadboard layout though, with fixed rows and columns. While this might work for most applications, he tried out a new type of prototyping board based on hexagons instead.
The design philosophy here revolves around tessellations, a tiling method for connecting the various components on this unique breadboard rather than using simple rows. The hexagons are tessellated across the board, allowing for some unique combinations that might make it slightly more complicated, but can have some benefits for other types of circuits such as anything involving the use of a three-wire device like a transistor.
The post is definitely worth a read, as [daverowntree] goes through several examples of this method of prototyping where the advantages are shown, like a voltage follower circuit and some other circuits involving transistor biasing. If you’re OK with the general design of breadboards, though, and just wished you didn’t have to do anything after the prototyping stage, we’ve got some help for you there as well.
New Apps Fight Robo-Calls By Pretending To Be Humans
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
My Kids Won’t Stop Gaslighting Me
If you’ve been around these internet parts for the past few years, you know all about gaslighting, wherein people stand behind a lie so fervently that they compel others to believe it as well, leaving marks unsure as to what is true and what really is the name of Apple CEO Tim Apple.
Man who invented Keurig K-Cups regrets it
John Sylvan, the Keurig engineer who invented the K-Cup pod coffee system in the 1990s, regrets his mistake. It was intended for the corporate service market and the idea that people have these things in their homes leaves him "absolutely mystified."
He says he doesn't begrudge the company for its success, or for wanting to make money, but he does question consumers' slavish devotion to the things. The company's latest product, the Keurig 2.0, which allows users to use pods to make larger cups and pots of coffee, is a great example of that.
"I stopped when I was walking in the grocery store aisle and I said, 'What is that?'" Sylvan recalls. "I picked it up and looked at it and said, 'You have to be kidding me.' Now they want you to make a pot of coffee with a Keurig machine."
I switched to a Nespresso Essenza Mini [Amazon] a while back and it tastes much better. You can send in your pods to be recycled by Nespresso. It's "espresso", mind you, not "coffee". If you want coffee, just get an Aeropress, for Christ's sake.
Previously: The worst K-Cup coffee
What It Means to Diversify Your Assets
For Ron Swanson, diversifying assets means selling some gold to buy a majority interest in the Lagavulin whisky distillery. For the average retail investor, it’s going to look a little different.
This One-Armed Robot Is Super Manipulative (in a Good Way)
AI Can Now Help Write Wikipedia Pages For Overlooked Scientists
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Space Photos of the Week: Scientists Are Seeing Red Over Jupiter’s Spot
LA's high-tech, thoughtful water management is cause for cautious optimism about adapting to climate change
Southern California is almost totally dependent on Sierra snowpack and the Colorado River for its water, and both sources are endangered by climate change, even as SoCal's cycle of long droughts and catastrophic, torrential rains gets more extreme thanks to climate change. (more…)
Roll Up Your Sleeve, Watch a Video with This Smart Watch Forearm Projector
We’re all slowly getting used to the idea of wearable technology, fabulous flops like the creepy Google Glass notwithstanding. But the big problem with tiny tech is in finding the real estate for user interfaces. Sure, we can make it tiny, but human fingers aren’t getting any smaller, and eyeballs can only resolve so much fine detail.
So how do we make wearables more usable? According to Carnegie-Mellon researcher [Chris Harrison], one way is to turn the wearer into the display and the input device (PDF link). More specifically, his LumiWatch projects a touch-responsive display onto the forearm of the wearer. The video below is pretty slick with some obvious CGI “artist’s rendition” displays up front. But even the somewhat limited displays shown later in the video are pretty impressive. The watch can claim up to 40-cm² of the user’s forearm for display, even at the shallow projection angle offered by a watch bezel only slightly above the arm — quite a feat given the irregular surface of the skin. It accomplishes this with a “pico-projector” consisting of red, blue, and green lasers and a pair of MEMS mirrors. The projector can adjust the linearity and brightness of the display to provide a consistent image across the uneven surface. An array of 10 time-of-flight sensors takes care of watching the display area for touch input gestures. It’s a fascinating project with a lot of potential, but we wonder how the variability of the human body might confound the display. Not to mention the need for short sleeves year round.
Need some basics on the micro-electrical mechanic systems (MEMS) behind the pico-projector in this watch? We’ve got a great primer on these microscopic machines.
How Grubhub Analyzed 4,000 Dishes to Predict Your Next Order
96-year-old style icon Iris Apfel gets her own Barbie
So, Mattel recently caught some slack after announcing a Frida Kahlo Barbie. Kahlo's estate is saying that the toy manufacturer didn't get permission from them to use her image and likeness. Mattel disputes the claim.
They did, however, get the blessing of "geriatric starlet" Iris Apfel to make a single Barbie doll in her likeness. Yes, just one.
Unfortunately, Iris Apfel Barbie is one of a kind. (Same as Iris Apfel herself.) But if you’d like to dress your regular degular Barbie just like her, that will soon be an option. This fall, Barbie will release a “Styled By” Barbie, complete with glasses and necklaces from Apfel’s own Rara Avis collection. In a photo taken “at the Carlyle Hotel” (one of Apfel’s haunts), Barbie even sports a new, short bob haircut to fit the profile.
Note that the emerald green Gucci suit the nonagenerian's Barbie is donning is styled after the one she wore on the cover of her new book, Iris Apfel: Accidental Icon.
(WOW)