Clouds In Space!

Well, this is the 21st Century after all:

Axiom Space and Spacebilt have announced plans to add optically interconnected Orbital Data Center (ODC) infrastructure to the International Space Station (ISS).

The company plans to launch two Axiom Orbital Data Center (AxODC) Nodes by the end of 2025, with at least three running by the end of 2027. It all sounds very exciting until you consider that Axiom Data Center Unit One (AxDCU-1), which eventually launched to the ISS in August, was a prototype that was roughly the size of a shoebox.

AxDCU-1 is more of a demonstrator to show that the concept works – think of an edge device on-orbit that can host hybrid cloud and applications, as well as cloud-native workloads. The AxODC Nodes are altogether more serious beasts. In addition to being interconnected, the hardware will be supported by an Optical Communication Terminal (OCT), allowing service to be provided to any spacecraft or satellite equipped with compatible OCTs.

So Cloud Computing for spacecraft.  It will be interesting to see where this goes, and how they handle the power demands of an orbiting data center. 

 

So long, i486. Thanks for all the fish

Linux will remove i486 support:

More than 36 years after the release of the 486 and 18 years after Intel stopped making them, leaders of the Linux kernel believe the project can improve itself by leaving i486 support behind. Ingo Molnar, quoting Linus Torvalds regarding "zero real reason for anybody to waste one second" on 486 support, submitted a patch series to the 6.15 kernel that updates its minimum support features. Those requirements now include TSC (Time Stamp Counter) and CX8 (i.e., "fixed" CMPXCH8B, its own whole thing), features that the 486 lacks (as do some early non-Pentium 586 processors).

It's not the first time Torvalds has suggested dropping support for 32-bit processors and relieving kernel developers from implementing archaic emulation and work-around solutions. "We got rid of i386 support back in 2012. Maybe it's time to get rid of i486 support in 2022," Torvalds wrote in October 2022. Failing major changes to the 6.15 kernel, which will likely arrive late this month, i486 support will be dropped.

The fact that this is news is actually the news.  Microsoft dropped 486 support when the released Windows XP (!) in 2001, basically a quarter century ago.  Linux has the all time record for backwards compatibility.

Full disclosure: I don't believe that I ever had a computer wit a 486 processor - I'm pretty sure I jumped straight from 386 to Pentium.  That said, I bought a used computer to turn into a Linux firewall back around 2000, and that ran until The Queen Of The World and I opened up Castle Borepatch in 2016.

Fare thee well, 486.  You've earned a rest after 36 years.

 

We used to call this HERF

High Energy Radio Frequency.  Now it seems to be some sort of cigar thing.  But the old HERF gun concept is back, to shoot down drones:

British soldiers have successfully taken down drones with a radio-wave weapon.

The demonstrator weapon, a type of Radiofrequency Directed Energy Weapon (RF DEW), uses high-frequency radio waves to disrupt the electronic components inside drones, resulting in the devices malfunctioning.

"RF DEW systems can defeat airborne targets at ranges of up to 1 km and are effective against threats which cannot be jammed using electronic warfare," the Ministry of Defence (MOD) said.

However, the nature of the technology means that a wide beam is used, which is effective at disabling multiple drones simultaneously, but lacks target discrimination. Hence, Sgt Mayers, the first British soldier to bring down drones using a radiofrequency weapon, described it as "a great asset to Layered Air Defence."

The MOD believes the system, which it estimates costs 10p per shot fired, "could provide a cost-effective complement to traditional missile-based air defence systems."

This is what you need - as long as drones cost more than 10p, you will win that exchange all day.

"Open the garage door, HAL."

Home AI computer for $250:

NVIDIA is taking the wraps off a new compact generative AI supercomputer, offering increased performance at a lower price with a software upgrade.

The new NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super Developer Kit, which fits in the palm of a hand, provides everyone from commercial AI developers to hobbyists and students, gains in generative AI capabilities and performance. And the price is now $249, down from $499.

Available today, it delivers as much as a 1.7x leap in generative AI inference performance, a 70% increase in performance to 67 INT8 TOPS, and a 50% increase in memory bandwidth to 102GB/s compared with its predecessor.

Don't think I need one of these, but that's me.

(via)

Well that went by fast

Lots of media huffing and puffing, but not much rain (especially when compared with Debbie last month) and not too bad for wind.  Power stayed on the whole time, so yay.

So in lieu of other blog fodder, here's an insanely cool story about a guy who made Linux run on a 1971 Intel 4004 chip:

Hardware hacker Dmitry Grinberg recently achieved what might sound impossible: booting Linux on the Intel 4004, the world's first commercial microprocessor. With just 2,300 transistors and an original clock speed of 740 kHz, the 1971 CPU is incredibly primitive by modern standards. And it's slow—it takes about 4.76 days for the Linux kernel to boot.

...

While it has no practical purpose, the Linux/4004 project demonstrates the flexibility of Linux and pushes emulation to its limits.

Linux on 50 year old hardware has got to be some sort of record.

Alternative to Adobe Photoshop

OldNFO points out a post at Lawrence's place about how Adobe has changed their terms of service.  Basically, you have to agree that they own all the work you create with their software, in order to get access to your work that you created on their software.

Sweet. 

Now IANAL, and so don't know how the (inevitable) Class Action lawsuit(s) will play out.  However, I am an enthusiastic user of The GIMP, a free (as in speech) Open Source Photoshop-alike application.

Yes, it has a Photoshop-worthy learning curve, but it is full featured and powerful, cross platform, and free.  No weird terms of service getting changed at midnight.

If you're looking for an alternative to Photoshop, I highly recommend this.

Decoding ancient scrolls from Pompeii

This sums up the problem:

The reason is that there were no printing presses in ancient and medieval times, so books had to be copied by hand.  If they weren't copied, the material would decay and the book would be lost.  Books were very expensive, which is why so few survived.

However, the volcanic eruption that buried Pompeii buried an ancient library.  The scrolls blackened from the heat but are intact.  People have been using cat scanning technology to image the insides, and are now trying to apply machine learning to decode what is ink and what is not.  While we can't yet read the scrolls, it seems that some real advancement in technique is being made:

This character is harder to make out, until the reader realizes that it is curved. It is first visible when looking for the dark narrow cracks in the “cracked mud” texture. It is a handwritten lunate sigma, which looks like a ‘c’.  The field of view is 3.35 mm high. The character is aligned directly to the right of the iota and pi characters, consistent in size, orthography, line width, alignment, ink texture, ink position relative to the papyrus, etc. Like the Pi, slight stroke width variations are recognizably derived from the motion of hand writing. 

With three characters (pi, iota, sigma) we can check if this is part of a word – of course it could be two words since ancient writing generally did not include spaces between words. Using this handy list (https://kyle-p-johnson.com/assets/most-common-greek-words.txt) we find 69 instances of πισ, and none of πγσ or πτσ.

This is a long and technical post but it is a really interesting approach to unlocking actual ancient mysteries. 

 

April Fools tech humor

Back in the early 90s I was a nerd [pauses to let shocked gasps die down].  There was a couple year period where I read every single one of the Internet specs that were released.  These documents are rather strangely named "Request For Comment" or RFCs.  Since it was my job to know nerdy Internet stuff then, I read 'em all, probably a couple a week back then.

Well every April Fools Day there would be a joke RFC.  There's a pretty good Wikipedia page that lists them.  Here's a recent example: RFC 8565, Hypertext Jeopardy Protocol.  The Abstract reads:

The Hypertext Jeopardy Protocol (HTJP) inverts the request/response semantics of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Using conventional HTTP, one connects to a server, asks a question, and expects a correct answer. Using HTJP, one connects to a server, sends an answer, and expects a correct question. This document specifies the semantics of HTJP.

Pretty funny right there, in a very nerdy way.  But one that I remember from way back in the day was RFC 1149, Standard for the transmission of IP datagrams on Avian Carriers.  Basically it was sending Internet messages by carrier pigeon.  We yuked this up around the coffee mess.

Well, it turns out some nerds actually implemented this - they built a working system that used pigeons:

Finally, rfc 1149 is implemented! On saturday 28th of april 2001, the worlds very first rfc 1149 network was tested. The weather was quite nice, despite being in one of the most rainy places in Norway.

The ping was started approximately at 12:15. We decided to do a 7 1/2 minute interval between the ping packets, that would leave a couple of packets unanswered, given ideal situations. Things didn't happen quite that way, though. It happened that the neighbour had a flock of pigeons flying. Our pigeons didn't want to go home at once, they wanted to fly with the other pigeons instead. And who can blame them, when the sun was finally shining after a couple of days?

But the instincts won at last, and after about an hour of fun, we could see a couple of pigeons breaking out of the flock and heading in the right direction. There was much cheering. Apparantly, it WAS our pigeons, because not long after, we got a report from the other site that the first pigeon was sitting on the roof.

Read the whole glorious thing here.  Linux nerds FTW!

Robert Heinlein (and most classic SF writers) were right

Well, they were right about one thing - a ginormous room to house computers in their novels.  Let me explain.

Tam writes (and I wholeheartedly agree) that "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" is Heinlein's finest novel.  Go read her kind-of review, but this part triggered a thought:

About the most noticeable anachronisms are that almost all communication seems to be by wired landline, although low powered suit radios are mentioned, and the idea of a huge room-sized computer running most of the moon is odd if you allow yourself to stop and think about it, but the plot steps along well enough that you probably won't.

Strangely, a huge room housing a computer that runs the Moon is sort of what's shaping up in today's modern IT technology.  Computing is racing to "The Cloud" which is a series of technologies that let you basically rent computer time from service providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS).  The key breakthroughs that made this possible include:

• Ubiquitous high speed Internet access;
• Scalable, reliable, Open Source operating systems (e.g. Linux)
• Enhancements like Docker and Kubernetes that let microservices spin up as needed, and spin down when they are no longer needed.

What's weird is that things have come sort of full circle from the 1960s and 1970 where you had the computer room behind glass walls and you submitted programs to the Operator at the desk.  Only now everything is automatic and controlled through an API.

What's driving this is that if you use the Cloud you get a lot of benefits:

• Higher availability that you could likely afford on your own.  Maybe not the fabled "Five 9s" (99.999% uptime) but for sure 3 Nines.  This is probably prohibitively expensive for you to do on your own because you have to buy a bunch of servers and put them in geographically separated data centers.
• Better security than you could probably afford on your own.  Good security is expensive, but if the servers are cookie-cutter installs then one security guy can cover a lot more of them.  Remember you need both computer security as well as physical security for the data center, which don't come cheap.  The Cloud dramatically lowers the cost to run a secure data center because you amortize the cost over many customers.
• You don't need as much hardware because more capacity spins up as you need it and spins down when you don't.  You only pay for what you need, rather than a big fat check to cover the peak if you were to do it on your own.

And so things look like this now:

I think Heinlein and Asimov would recognize this instantly.

What's really weird about all of this was this story from Back In The Day.  I was at an early Internet conference (1992?) at a session on High Speed Networking (back then, 200 Mbps was righteous).  One presenter made the comment that if you imagine a fast enough network you could run the entire country from Data Centers in Kansas City.  We all laughed.

Except maybe you could run the country from Data Centers in Kansas City.  Funny how what's old is new again.

Microsoft and Linux, sitting in a tree ...

 K-I-S-S-I-N-G:

Microsoft this week released a preview version of Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI, or WSLg, which provides a way to run Linux applications with graphic interfaces on Windows devices.

...

"You can use this feature to run any GUI application that might only exist in Linux, or to run your own applications or testing in a Linux environment," explained Craig Loewen, program manager for the Windows Developer Platform at Microsoft, in a blog post.

Man, the tech world is getting weird.  Eric Raymond had a pretty interesting take on this last year:

Azure makes Microsoft most of its money. The Windows monopoly has become a sideshow, with sales of conventional desktop PCs (the only market it dominates) declining. Accordingly, the return on investment of spending on Windows development is falling. As PC volume sales continue to fall off , it’s inevitably going to stop being a profit center and turn into a drag on the business.

Looked at from the point of view of cold-blooded profit maximization, this means continuing Windows development is a thing Microsoft would prefer not to be doing. Instead, they’d do better putting more capital investment into Azure – which is widely rumored to be running more Linux instances than Windows these days.

Interesting world we live in.

This seems like big environment news

New process frees hydrogen from oil sands; price of hydrogen could fall by 75%:

Scientists have developed a large-scale economical method to extract hydrogen (H2) from oil sands (natural bitumen) and oil fields. This can be used to power hydrogen-powered vehicles, which are already marketed in some countries, as well as to generate electricity; hydrogen is regarded as an efficient transport fuel, similar to petrol and diesel, but with no pollution problems. The process can extract hydrogen from existing oil sands reservoirs, with huge existing supplies found in Canada and Venezuela. Interestingly, this process can be applied to mainstream oil fields, causing them to produce hydrogen instead of oil.

Hydrogen powered vehicles, including cars, buses, and trains, have been in development for many years. These vehicles have been acknowledged to be efficient, but the high price of extracting the Hydrogen from oil reserves has meant that the technology has not been economically viable. Now a group of Canadian engineers have developed a cheap method of extracting H2 from oil sands.

If it actually is that inexpensive then it would cost less than gasoline for equivalent energy output.

Prediction: since the whole "Climate Change" nonsense is politically (rather than scientifically) motivated, the Usual Suspects® will start coming up with reasons that this is bad for the environment.  My guess is that they will say that burning hydrogen produces water vapor (true) which is the most prevalent greenhouse gas, responsible for ~ 80% of the greenhouse warming (also true).  So they will claim that water is a pollutant, just like they claim that carbon dioxide is a pollutant.  I mean, the economy isn't going to change itself into a Grand Socialist Experiment, so they need something to complain about.

Urbit raises $200,000 in crowd sale

This seems like big news:

Urbit, the computing platform described as a “city in the cloud” by its inventors, raised more than $200,000 in four hours through a crowdsale last week. While the crypto-space has seen many spectacular crowd-sales, some more dodgy than others, Urbit has been able to excite leading venture capitalists and executives in the space, including BitGo's Ben Davenport, 21 Inc.'s Balaji Srinivasan and Chaincode Labs' Alex Morcos.

...

Urbit doesn’t get rid of the complexity of the decades-old Unix-Internet platform, which requires a professional sysadmin, by removing it. Rather, Urbit installs a new platform, redesigned from scratch, on top of the old platform.

What's interesting about this is it's a sign of the commercial viability of an extremely subversive new architecture.  I posted about this a while back and it's long and detailed (and you should RTWT) but this is the subversive part:

And now to the really subversive part.  Clark again:

Back in the early days of the internet when Usenet was cutting edge, there was a gent by the name of Timothy C May who formed the cypherpunk mailing list.
His signature block at the time read

Timothy C. May, Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero knowledge, reputations, information markets, black markets, collapse of government.

I bring up his sig block because in list form it functions like an avalanche. The first few nouns are obvious and unimportant – a few grains of snow sliding. The next few are derived from the first in a strict syllogism-like fashion, and then the train / avalanche / whatever gains speed, and finally we've got black markets, and soon after that we've got the collapse of government. And it all started with a single snowflake landing at the beginning of the sig block.

...

I suggest that Urbit may very well have a similar trajectory. Functional programming language. Small core. Decentralization.

First someone will rewrite Tor in it – a trivial exercise. Then some silly toy-like web browser and maybe a matching web server. They won't get much traction. Then someone will write something cool – a decentralized jukebox that leverages Urbit's privileges, delegation and neo-feudalist access control lists to give permissions to one's own friends and family and uses the built in cryptography to hide the files from the MPAA. Or maybe someone will code a MMORPG that does amazingly detailed rendering of algorithmically created dungeons by using spare cycles on the machines of game players (actually delegating the gaming firms core servers out onto customer hardware).

Probably it will be something I haven't imagined.

At the close of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the crowd was desperate for news on what was going on.  Benjamin Franklin came out of the building and a woman asked him was was the outcome of the meeting.  He is said to have replied "A Republic, if you can keep it".  The Internet was founded on decentralization, but we are struggling (and losing) to keep that.  Urbit is - maybe - a path to restoring that.

Nazi sub base gets repurposed as a data center

It is near the termination of submarine cables from the Middle East, and so there's low latency (combined with political stability).  And it's pretty near bomb proof:

That has made Marseille a magnet for data-center operations—where data and application providers can "put platforms in a safe environment in terms of legal and financial environments like Europe and particularly the European Union and at the same time be connected to 46 countries directly with a very low latency," Coquio explained. "Basically, in the last 15 years, we have [cut] the cost of a submarine cable to a [10th of what it was] and multiplied the capacity by 50."

As a result of this transformation of the Internet world and the corresponding rise of Marseille as a digital content center for the world, demand for co-location space has driven Interxion to undertake an interesting construction project: the conversion of a former Nazi submarine base into a seaside data center.

Pretty cool in a Bond-villian-evil-lair sort of way.  But it has a way to go for top spot in that category:

In an underground bunker 100 feet beneath Stockholm lies a unique facility operated by the Swedish ISP Bahnhof. It’s become known as the “James Bond Villain Data Center” after it was featured on the Pingdom web site last year. Dean Nelson of Data Center Pulse recently got a tour of the data center from Bahnhof CEO Jon Karlung, who provided a look at the many unusual features of the facility, a former military bunker designed to withstand a hydrogen bomb blast. Karlung has said he drew his inspiration for many of the center’s flourishes from James Bond villains (especially Ernst Blofeld), hence the waterfalls, greenhouse-style NOC, glass-enclosed conference room “floating” above the colocation floor, and blue-lit diesel engines (supposedly used in German submarines).

But the Marseille one has "low latency", doesn't it?

Rasputin sings Beyonce

DeepFake creates fake videos.  Now the 3.0 version makes videos out of a single photograph.  Here's Rasputin getting jiggy:



It's fun, but not convincing.  But that's not really the point:

When the researchers asked 66 people to watch 24 videos – 12 are real, and 12 deepfakes – people could only label them as real or fake correctly about 52 per cent of the time. “This model has shown promising results in generating lifelike videos, which produce facial expressions that reflect the speakers tone. The inability of users to distinguish the synthesized videos from the real ones in the Turing test verifies that the videos produced look natural,” the researchers concluded.

They are getting better.  Whether they will get better enough to be able to fool experts - Joe Off The Street is notoriously bad at detecting stuff like this - remains to be seen.

Linux on the Desktop - it's finally here

For the last 20 years we've heard that the next year will be the year that Linux comes to the desktop - each and every year, we heard it.  Well, it actually looks like it's here, because Microsoft is shipping it:

The biggest news of Microsoft's annual developer get-together, Build, this year was the arrival of the Linux kernel as part of Windows Subsystem for Linux 2. Oh, and a new tab-happy Windows Terminal? It's in GitHub. 

Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 

The Windows Subsystem Linux (WSL), which lets you run Linux programs on a Windows box, has seen some serious love from Microsoft as its engineers attempt to demonstrate their commitment to open source and Linux.

And it's even GPL'ed.  By Microsoft.

Just stop and think about that for a second. It means when you come to run a program, the Windows kernel will either interface with it directly if it's a Windows application, or allow the Linux kernel to manage it if it's a Linux application. Now you can run Linux software truly natively on the world's largest desktop OS platform, developed by a company that once declared Linux "a cancer."

I did not expect the future to be so weird.

Apple facial recognition goes haywire, teen gets wrongly accused of shoplifting

Apple is being sued for $1B:

Ousmane Bah, 18, filed suit against Cook & Co this week after he was falsely identified as a shoplifter by, it is claimed, a facial recognition system Apple is apparently using in its stores. 

Bah was wrongly accused by the cops of nicking gear from Apple's posh shops across the US East Coast, even in cities he claims never to have visited, due to Apple's technology incorrectly fingering him as the culprit, we're told. 

The teen's legal complaint [PDF] states that last year the college student received a letter out of the blue summoning him to a Boston court on an allegation of theft. He was accused of stealing multiple Apple Pencils – a $99 tool used for the iPad Pro – from an Apple Store in the Massachusetts city, adding up to over $1,200 in swag. 

At the time of the alleged crime, on May 31, 2018, Bah was attending his senior prom in Manhattan, and had never even been to Boston before.

Worse, the photo included in his arrest warrant doesn't look like him.  Facial recognition has been plagued with errors, particularly with non-caucasians.  I don't know exactly why this is, but it has been a persistent complaint for several years.  Apple is said to use facial recognition in its stores to detect shoplifting.  When Bah had been (incorrectly) identified as a shoplifter in one store, the store personnel took his driver's permit and used his name and address information to update their database.  His permit did not have a photo on it, and so now someone else's picture is associated with him.

And now Bah has an arrest record and Apple is defending itself against an enormous lawsuit.  Hey, at least their software didn't kill anyone.

This is why I won't get into a self-driving car.  The code was written by snotty programmers who think they know way more than they actually do about how the world works.

Skynet smiles

Boeing debuts unmanned "wingman" aircraft that flies in formation with military jets:

Boeing has built an autonomous military aeroplane that flies in formation with a manned fighter jet to ward off electronic warfare attacks. Reports say the craft could be modified to carry and use its own weapons. 

The electronic warfare drone was built for the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) by the American aerospace conglomerate and is roughly the size of a traditional military fast jet, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 

"Its primary purpose would be to conduct electronic warfare and reconnaissance missions, particularly in environments where it is considered risky to send manned aircraft," reported the Aussie state broadcaster.

Baby steps towards the End Days.

The first steam locomotive - 215 years ago

On this day in 1804, Richard Trevithick debuted the world's first self propelled steam locomotive at the Welsh iron mill at Pen-y-Darren.  It pulled five cars loaded with ten tons of iron and around 70 iron workers nine miles, at a speed of five miles per hour.  It was so heavy that after three trips its weight broke the rails and it ended its life as a stationary steam engine.

It was followed with other - and better - locomotives: The Rocket, The Flying Scotsman, The Mallard, the Shinkansen and the TGV.  But it was the first, which is what we remember.  This is a reproduction.



There is a magic to all of this.  Castle Borepatch lies near (but not too near) a trunk line and it's possible in the dead of night to listen to the horn of the Night Train.  It's the sound of nostalgia.  Sure, airliners get you there faster but I'm not sure that anyone ever wrote a song like this for a Boeing.

The earliest commercially practical color photography

Image de la Wik

The first black and white photos date to the 1820s and the first color one to 1842, but color photography wasn't practical as other than a laboratory exercise until the Lumière brothers patented a strange Autochrome technique in 1907.  A glass plate had various colored starch granules applied; the granules acted as color filters allowing actual practical color photography - as the 1917 Nieuport 23 fighter shows.

It's surprising what we have from this period, for example Mark Twain from 1907:

It's interesting just how old some still common technology is.  I posted years ago about Thomas Edison's recording of Brahms himself playing one of his compositions.  The recording comes not on wax cylinder but via Youtube, just as the photos above are on your computer screen rather than printed on paper.  But they are both still recordings and photos, from over a century ago.

Not to mention the first four engine strategic bomber from way back in 1913.

The world's first car

It's older than America.

Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot invented this fardier à vapeur in 1770.  It was a three wheeled steam powered transport developed for the French Army, who was looking for something to haul cannons around.  While it had all sorts of drawbacks (you had to fill up its water tank every 15 minutes) it actually worked, and would go several miles per hour while loaded with a few tons of stuff.  He got a pension from King Louis XV for this.

What's cool is that in 2010 some students at ParisTech (yes, there is such a school although they likely have never gone to a Bowl Game) built a working model from original plans.  The public unveiling starts about 2 minutes into the video and while the music is more than a bit annoying the fardier itself is tres magnifique.