Long-time Slashdot reader UnknowingFool writes: AMD filed a patent on using chiplets for a GPU with hints on why it has waited this long to extend their CPU strategy to GPUs. The latency between chiplets poses more of a performance problem for GPUs, and AMD is attempting to solve the problem with a new interconnect called high bandwidth passive crosslink. This new interconnect will allow each GPU to more effectively communicate with each other and the CPU. "With NVIDIA working on its own MCM design with Hopper architecture, it's about time that we left monolithic GPU designs in the past and enable truly exponential performance growth," argues Wccftech. And Hot Hardware delves into the details, calling it a "hybrid CPU-FPGA design that could be enabled by Xilinx tech." While they often aren't as great as CPUs on their own, FPGAs can do a wonderful job accelerating specific tasks... [A]n FPGA in the hands of a capable engineer can offload a wide variety of tasks from a CPU and speed processes along. Intel has talked a big game about integrating Xeons with FPGAs over the last six years, but it hasn't resulted in a single product hitting its lineup. A new patent by AMD, though, could mean that the FPGA newcomer might be ready to make one of its own... AMD made 20 claims in its patent application, but the gist is that a processor can include one or more execution units that can be programmed to handle different types of custom instruction sets. That's exactly what an FPGA does... AMD has been working on different ways to speed up AI calculations for years. First the company announced and released the Radeon Impact series of AI accelerators, which were just big headless Radeon graphics processors with custom drivers. The company doubled down on that with the release of the MI60, its first 7-nm GPU ahead of the Radeon RX 5000 series launch, in 2018. A shift to focusing on AI via FPGAs after the Xilinx acquisition makes sense, and we're excited to see what the company comes up with.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"When you do computer programming, what sort of mental work are you doing?" asks science/tech journalist Clive Thompson: For a long time, folks have speculated on this. Since coding involves pondering hierarchies of symbols, maybe the mental work is kinda like writing or reading? Others have speculated it's more similar to the way our brains process math and puzzles. A group of MIT neuroscientists recently did fMRI brain-scans of young adults while they were solving a small coding challenge using a textual programming language (Python) and a visual one (Scratch Jr.). The results? The brain activity wasn't similar to when we process language. Instead, coding seems to activate the "multiple demand network," which — as the scientists note in a public-relations writeup of their work — "is also recruited for complex cognitive tasks such as solving math problems or crossword puzzles." So, coding is more like doing math than processing language? Sorrrrrrt of ... but not exactly so. The scientists saw activity patterns that differ from those you'd see during math, too. The upshot: Coding — in this (very preliminary!) work, anyway — looks to be a little different from either language or math. As the note, in a media release... "Understanding computer code seems to be its own thing...." Just anecdotally — having interviewed hundreds of coders and computer scientists for my book CODERS — I've met amazing programmers and computer scientists with all manner of intellectual makeups. There were math-heads, and there were people who practically counted on their fingers. There were programmers obsessed with — and eloquent in — language, and ones gently baffled by written and spoken communication. Lots of musicians, lots of folks who slid in via a love of art and visual design, then whose brains just seized excitedly on the mouthfeel of algorithms.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Update: They put four minutes of the audio on YouTube.

I wish the Washington Post would open source the audio. Upload it somewhere. The full conversation, not excerpts. This should be on the record, for all to hear, not behind a paywall. I'm not saying they should or have to, but this is history. We should get it all, right now. Everyone should hear it.

I'm glad we have the audio of Trump trying to bully the Georgia secretary of state. As this is going on the country is botching the administration of the vaccine. And the states and cities are running out of money. And his "supporters" think this situation is fine.

Last Sunday we reported Bitcoin's price had surged 50% in the previous month. In the week since it's surged another 24.8%. As Bitcoin celebrates its 12th anniversary, a Forbes columnist writes that Bitcoin "soared to $34,000 yesterday — but here's why Warren Buffett will never own Bitcoin." Buffett has called Bitcoin, among other names, "rat poison squared" and has said he won't ever buy the cryptocurrency. "I don't have any cryptocurrency and I never will," Buffett told CNBC in February, when Bitcoin was trading at about $10,000. Here are 3 reasons why Buffett will never own Bitcoin, no matter how high the price of Bitcoin soars: Buffett believes that Bitcoin has no underlying value. As a value investor, Buffett invests in companies that are undervalued, produce stable and recurring cash flow and have the ability to increase in book value. To Buffett, Bitcoin doesn't produce earnings or dividends. Rather, the value of Bitcoin is simply what one person is willing to pay for it. In this regard, Bitcoin is no different than the tulip craze of 1637. Therefore, Buffett believes that Bitcoin has no inherent value... While all investing involves some degree of speculation, Buffett's background is in insurance and risk mitigation. Buffett doesn't invest in "high fliers" — that's not his game. His game is "buy and hold" — forever. He invests in companies that grow over time, steadily and consistently. And the third reason? Warren Buffett "only invests in things he understands." "He prefers to invest in stable consumer goods companies like Coca-Cola and financial services companies like American Express."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I said something in yesterday's post about podcasting that caused some understandable confusion. Here's what I said. "There are rules about this medium." I think that's true, not one rule for everyone at all times, but genres and practices, conventions. Any art has them, and then every artist breaks them. That's part of the art. Also only steal from the best -- another rule. Every artist steals. If there are rules for standards-makers, there must also be rules for podcasters, no? I don't claim that what I say are the rules. But there is one rule imho that art must follow, it must respect the observer, as a participant. If your art doesn't do that, I'm probably not going to like it. Doesn't mean I won't come back. Art is weird. If it isn't, it isn't art, imho.

It shouldn't matter where a good idea comes from.

CNN reports that some critics are now questioning whether America's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is equipped to protect the integrity of government systems from adversaries: Some of the nearly half-dozen government agencies affected by the hack have recently reached out to CISA for help with addressing the known vulnerabilities that were exploited in the attack but were told the agency did not have enough resources to provide direct support, according to a source familiar with the requests. The person noted the slow response has only increased the perception that CISA is overstretched. Multiple sources told CNN that CISA, which operates as the Department of Homeland Security's cyber arm, does not have the appropriate level of funding or necessary resources to effectively handle an issue of this magnitude. "It's a two-year-old agency with about 2,000 employees, so clearly that level of responsibility is not commensurate with the resources that they have," Kiersten Todt, a former Obama cybersecurity official and managing director of the Cyber Readiness Institute, recently told CNN.... "CISA is not capable," according to James Andrew Lewis, cybersecurity and technology expert at the Center for Strategic and International, who added that the agency's failure to detect the breach months ago was largely due to the fact its attention and resources were consumed by efforts to secure the 2020 presidential election. "CISA has always been and will continue to be slammed by the responsibilities heaped on it by law," Daniel Dister, New Hampshire's chief information security officer, told CNN. "They have been overloaded with work from the start and have had a hard time coming up to the level of expertise that DoD/CYBERCOM/NSA has enjoyed." Yesterday the New York Times noted the breach wasn't detected by any U.S. government cyberdefense agency (or the Department of Homeland Security), but by private cybersecurity firm FireEye. "It's clear the United States government missed it," the Times was told by Senator Mark Warner, ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. "And if FireEye had not come forward, I'm not sure we would be fully aware of it to this day." The breach is far broader than first believed. Initial estimates were that Russia sent its probes only into a few dozen of the 18,000 government and private networks they gained access to when they inserted code into network management software made by a Texas company named SolarWinds. But as businesses like Amazon and Microsoft that provide cloud services dig deeper for evidence, it now appears Russia exploited multiple layers of the supply chain to gain access to as many as 250 networks. The hackers managed their intrusion from servers inside the United States, exploiting legal prohibitions on the National Security Agency from engaging in domestic surveillance and eluding cyberdefenses deployed by the Department of Homeland Security. "Early warning" sensors placed by Cyber Command and the National Security Agency deep inside foreign networks to detect brewing attacks clearly failed. There is also no indication yet that any human intelligence alerted the United States to the hacking.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AmiMoJo quotes Universe Today: Other worlds aren't the only difficult terrain personnel will have to traverse in humanity's exploration of the solar system. There are some parts of our own planet that are inhospitable and hard to travel over. Inner Mongolia, a northern province of China, would certainly classify as one of those areas, especially in winter. But that's exactly the terrain team members from the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASTC) had to traverse on December 16th to retrieve lunar samples from the Chang'e-5 mission. What was even more unique is that they did it with the help of exoskeletons. Strangely enough, the workers wearing the exoskeletons weren't there to help with a difficult mountain ascent, or even pick up the payload of the lunar lander itself (which only weighed 2 kg). It was to set up a communications tent to connect the field team back to the main CASTC headquarters in Beijing. The exoskeletons were designed to help people carry approximately twice as much as they would be able to. Local state media described a single person carrying 50kg over 100m of the rough terrain without becoming tired. Setting up communications equipment isn't all the exoskeletons are good for though. They were most recently used by Chinese military logistics and medical staff in the Himalayas, where the country has been facing down the Indian military over a disputed line of control.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fast Company's technology editor harrymcc writes: After years of growing technical irrelevance and security concerns, the Flash browser plug-in will reach the end of the road on January 12 when Adobe blocks its ability to display content. The web will survive just fine. But there's a huge library of old Flash games — some of them quirky, interesting, and worth preserving. Over at Fast Company, Jared Newman wrote about several grassroots initiatives that will allow us to continue to enjoy these artifacts of the Flash era even after Flash is history. Some tips from the article: If you have a Windows PC, the best way to replay old Flash content is with FlashPoint, a free program with more than 70,000 web games and 8,000 animations, most of which are Flash-based. (Experimental Mac and Linux versions are also available, but are complicated to set up....) Conifer lets you run a legacy browser with Flash support on a remote machine, insulating you from any security issues... The Internet Archive has made thousands of Flash games and animations playable online in modern web browsers through emulation, so you can play the Helicopter Game or watch Peanut Butter Jelly Time in their original forms. Ruffle is the underlying emulation software that The Internet Archive is using. You can also install it as a standalone program or browser extension... Newgrounds has released its own Flash Player for Windows that safely loads content from its website, so you still get the full experience of using Newgrounds proper. But the article opens with a sentence reminding us that "After all the challenges of 2020, there's one thing we can all look forward to in the new year: Adobe Flash Player will finally be dead."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader serviscope_minor wanted to remind us that 2020 also saw the death of science fiction/fantasy author Debra Doyle at the age of 67 from a sudden cardiac event. "Her works were co-written with her husband, James D. Macdonald," notes her entry on Wikipedia: Her first work written with Macdonald was "Bad Blood" in 1988. Their novel Knight's Wyrd was awarded the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children's Literature in 1992 and appeared on the New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age list in 1993. They published two series, Mageworlds (7 novels) and The Wizard Apprentice (8 novels), and two alternate history novels, Land of Mist and Snow and Lincoln's Sword. Doyle and Macdonald also published together under other names. They published their first novel, Night of Ghosts and Lightning, in 1989 under the house name Robyn Tallis; two Tom Swift novels under the house name Victor Appleton; Pep Rally, Blood Brothers, and Vampire's Kiss under the house name Nicholas Adams; and two Spider-Man novels as Martin Delrio. Together Doyle and Macdonald made up part of the core membership of the sff.net website and rec.arts.sff newsgroup. Doyle also taught at the Viable Paradise genre writer's workshop on Martha's Vineyard.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from the New York Times: Twirling above a strip of land at the mouth of Rotterdam's harbor [in the Netherlands] is a wind turbine so large it is difficult to photograph. The turning diameter of its rotor is longer than two American football fields end to end. Later models will be taller than any building on the mainland of Western Europe. Packed with sensors gathering data on wind speeds, electricity output and stresses on its components, the giant whirling machine in the Netherlands is a test model for a new series of giant offshore wind turbines planned by General Electric. When assembled in arrays, the wind machines have the potential to power cities, supplanting the emissions-spewing coal- or natural gas-fired plants that form the backbones of many electric systems today... [A]lready the giant turbines have turned heads in the industry. A top executive at the world's leading wind farm developer called it a "bit of a leapfrog over the latest technology." And an analyst said the machine's size and advance sales had "shaken the industry." The prototype is the first of a generation of new machines that are about a third more powerful than the largest already in commercial service. As such, it is changing the business calculations of wind equipment makers, developers and investors. The G.E. machines will have a generating capacity that would have been almost unimaginable a decade ago. A single one will be able to turn out 13 megawatts of power, enough to light up a town of roughly 12,000 homes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mozilla is "investigating" a design refresh for its Firefox browser. Ghacks reports that the refresh is referred to internally as "Photon." Information about the design refresh is limited at this point in time. Mozilla created a meta bug on Bugzilla as a reference to keep track of the changes. While there are not any mockups or screenshots posted on the site, the names of the bugs provide information on the elements that will get a refresh. These are: - The Firefox address bar and tabs bar. - The main Firefox menu. - Infobars. - Doorhangers. - Context Menus. - Modals. Most user interface elements are listed in the meta bug. Mozilla plans to release the new design in Firefox 89; the browser is scheduled for a mid-2021 release. Its release date is set to May 18, 2021... [Developer/Firefox extension author] Sören Hentzschel revealed that he saw some of the Firefox Proton mockups... He notes that Firefox will look more modern when the designs land and that Mozilla plans to introduce useful improvements, especially in regards to the user experience. Hentzschel mentions two examples of potential improvements to the user experience: a mockup that displays vertical tabs in a compact mode, and another that shows the grouping of tabs on the tab bar.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dilbert readers - Please visit Dilbert.com to read this feature. Due to changes with our feeds, we are now making this RSS feed a link to Dilbert.com.