News gathered 2024-05-06
(date: 2024-05-06 07:49:40)
Snikket: this week’s sponsor
date: 2024-05-06, from: OS News
Snikket is a FOSS project for creating private chat spaces for small groups, such as families, friends, or clubs. It doesn’t depend on a phone number, doesn’t upload address books anywhere, and doesn’t sell data to advertisers. It supports all the features you expect, including media and voice messages, audio and video calls, end-to-end encryption, group messaging, and more. Use it from multiple devices at once with the official apps, or even with unofficial, third-party apps. Snikket is easy to self-host, and professional managed hosting is also available. Our previous sponsor, JMP, opted to donate a free week’s sponsorship to Snikket, which any paying OSNews sponsor can opt to do. This is our very small way of giving something back to the countless open source and/or smaller projects out there. Thank you Snikket for sponsoring OSNews!
https://www.osnews.com/story/139582/snikket-this-weeks-sponsor/
With PowerPC, Windows CE and the WiiN-PAD slate, everyone’s a WiiN-er (except Data General)
date: 2024-05-06, from: OS News
That’s right: it’s PowerPC, the most unloved of the architectures CE ever ran on — in fact, this is the first PowerPC Windows CE device I’ve ever found, and I’m the self-described biggest pro-PowerPC bigot in the world. Here’s an unusual form factor Windows CE device, running on the operating system’s least used CPU, from a storied computer company near the end of its run, intended for medical applications, produced in very small numbers and cancelled within months. What are we going to do with it? Well, what do you think we’re gonna do with it? We’re going to program it, so that we can finally have some software! And, of course, since this wacky thing was there at the bitter end, we’ll talk more about the last days of Data General and what happened next. ↫ Cameron Kaiser I knew Windows CE supported PowerPC, but I never knew any PowerPC-based Windows CE devices ever actually shipped and made it to market. Only Windows CE 2.0 seems to have supported the architecture, and it seems to have been eliminated in 3.0 and 4.0, so it’s not surprising there weren’t many PowerPC Windows CE devices out there. The device that’s the subject of this article, too, only lasted on the market for a few months, so it’s definitely a rarity.
A Rosetta Stone for Mathematics
date: 2024-05-06, from: Quanta Magazine
In 1940 André Weil wrote a letter to his sister, Simone, outlining his vision for translating between three distinct areas of mathematics. Eighty years later, it still animates many of the most exciting developments in the field.The post A Rosetta Stone for Mathematics first appeared on Quanta Magazine
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-rosetta-stone-for-mathematics-20240506/
San Jose real estate war at BART site may need jury as mediation fails
date: 2024-05-06, from: San Jose Mercury News
A battle over a key downtown San Jose property needed for a future BART station may head to a jury trial.
Palm OS gets a TOTP application
date: 2024-05-06, from: OS News
Still rocking your Palm OS device, but mutter under your breath every time you need to log into a website or service with two-factor authentication? Sick of carrying around an Android or iOS device just so you can log in on your Palm PDA? Worry no more, your prayers have been answered, you can finally throw that Android or iOS garbage into the sun. Get your 2-factor codes on your Palm, just like Google Authenticator. Unlike Hotpants (an old port of a J2ME phone app), this version takes up much less space and supports all Palm OS versions. ↫ Nathan Korth You can now generate 2FA codes on your Palm device. This is wild, and I absolutely love it. I might if set it up on one of my dozens of Palm OS devices and just put it next to my keyboard for easy access. There’s no cooler way to handle 2FA than this.
https://www.osnews.com/story/139577/palm-os-gets-a-totp-application/
Geely-owned EV brand ZEEKR sits on cusp of a US IPO seeking valuation of $5.13 billion
date: 2024-05-06, from: Electrek Feed
Young EV-centric brand ZEEKR is continuing its efforts to become a globally recognized name in the space as it gears up for an initial public offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) this week. The Geely-owned sub-brand will go public later this week and seeks a valuation of over 5 billion dollars.
https://electrek.co/2024/05/06/zeekr-sits-on-cusp-of-a-us-ipo-seeking-valuation-of-5-13-billion/
CSUN’s Model United Nations team wins Outstanding Delegation Award at New York conference
date: 2024-05-06, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
California State University, Northridge’s Model United Nations won first place at the Model United Nations conference in New York, earning the Outstanding Delegation Award as Guinea Bissau and Honorable Mention…
‘Detached From Reality’: Welcome To The Tesla vs. $TSLA Showdown
date: 2024-05-06, from: Inside EVs News
Also on tap for today’s roundup: a look at Toyota’s challenges despite massive profits, and a prediction for Lucid’s Q1 report.
https://insideevs.com/news/718592/tesla-reality-critical-materials/
Amazon Driver Saves Woman’s Life, Rewarded With Pizza Party and Laptop
date: 2024-05-06, from: 404 Media Group
“It’s always ‘An Amazon Driver’ when they do something good, and ‘a third party Amazon driver’ when it’s bad.”
https://www.404media.co/amazon-driver-saves-womans-life-rewarded-with-pizza-party-and-laptop/
Columbia University cancels main commencement after protests that roiled campus for weeks
date: 2024-05-06, from: VOA News USA
New York — Columbia University is canceling its large university-wide commencement ceremony amid ongoing pro-Palestinian protests but will hold smaller school-based ceremonies this week and next, the university announced Monday.
“Based on feedback from our students, we have decided to focus attention on our Class Days and school-level graduation ceremonies, where students are honored individually alongside their peers, and to forego the university-wide ceremony that is scheduled for May 15,” Columbia officials said in a statement.
The protests stem from the conflict that started Oct. 7 when Hamas militants attacked southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking roughly 250 hostages. Vowing to destroy Hamas, Israel launched an offensive in Gaza that has killed more than 34,500 Palestinians, about two-thirds of them women and children, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-ruled territory. Israeli strikes have devastated the enclave and displaced most of its inhabitants.
The University of Southern California earlier canceled its main graduation ceremony while allowing other commencement activities to continue.
CISA says ‘no more’ to decades-old directory traversal bugs
date: 2024-05-06, updated: 2024-05-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Recent attacks on healthcare thrust infosec agency into alert mode
CISA is calling on the software industry to stamp out directory traversal vulnerabilities following recent high-profile exploits of the 20-year-old class of bugs.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/05/06/cisa_alert_dt_bugs/
Sierra Nevada site records snowiest day of the season. Yes, in May.
date: 2024-05-06, from: San Jose Mercury News
“Did anyone have the snowiest day of the 2023/2024 season being in May on their winter bingo card?” the University of California’s Central Sierra Snow Lab asked.
This Ship Mysteriously Vanished 115 Years Ago. Now, It’s Been Found at the Bottom of Lake Superior
date: 2024-05-06, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Nobody knew what happened to the “Adella Shores,” which disappeared with 14 crew members aboard in 1909
Asian grilling inspiration — yakitori, satays and more — unleash dazzling flavors
date: 2024-05-06, from: San Jose Mercury News
Here’s how to make Chicken and Green Onion Yakitori, Chicken Satay wth Peanut Sauce, Grilled Asian Eggplants and Beef Skewers with Green Apple Salad.
Wish You Were Here: Visiting one of the most remote places on Earth
date: 2024-05-06, from: San Jose Mercury News
Made famous by the mutiny on the HMS Bounty, Pitcairn Island is the most remote inhabited island in the world. A Sunnyvale retiree recently went there.
The sublime and deeply therapeutic joys of karaoke in the Bay Area
date: 2024-05-06, from: San Jose Mercury News
Some people wave off karaoke as a silly hobby. They couldn’t be more wrong.
Sing your heart out at these East Bay and South Bay karaoke bars
date: 2024-05-06, from: San Jose Mercury News
Whether you prefer to shine in the spotlight or simply sit back for the show, check out this selection of local karaoke bars for Bay Area music lovers.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/05/06/sing-your-heart-out-at-these-east-and-south-bay-karaoke-bars/
TasteFood: A seasonal asparagus-quinoa salad for spring
date: 2024-05-06, from: San Jose Mercury News
This easy Lemony Asparagus Salad is served on a bed of quinoa.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/05/06/tastefood-a-seasonal-asparagus-quinoa-salad-for-spring/
Did a Southern California rattlesnake hitch a ride to Walnut Creek?
date: 2024-05-06, from: San Jose Mercury News
Plus: a reader wonders about birdbaths and mosquito season.
Budget car rental cleaning fee problem: That’s not my vehicle!
date: 2024-05-06, from: San Jose Mercury News
After Budget finds animal hairs in Bernard Sia’s rental car, it charges him a $125 cleaning fee. But Sia doesn’t have a pet – and that’s not the only problem.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/05/06/budget-car-rental-cleaning-fee-problem-thats-not-my-vehicle/
Pornhub’s Biggest Star Is Promoting an AI Nonconsensual ‘Nudify’ App
date: 2024-05-06, from: 404 Media Group
Sweetie Fox, Pornhub’s top adult content creator, made a sponsored video for a well-known nonconsensual “nudify” app.
https://www.404media.co/pornhubs-biggest-star-is-promoting-an-ai-nonconsensual-nudify-app/
Oddly Unappealing
date: 2024-05-06, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
It has become tiresome, hearing pundits on the Left and Right, oddly and in unison proclaiming criminal defendant Trump is scoring points with voters (which voters?) by attempting to undermine The Rule of Law.
The post Oddly Unappealing appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/05/06/oddly-unappealing/
Concord is nearly $40 million in the hole for Naval Weapons Station project. Here’s how they plan to get it back.
date: 2024-05-06, from: San Jose Mercury News
The city of Concord has paid 38 vendors and consultants since Oct. 2005.
Elon Musk’s no.2 at Tesla goes back to China as the CEO isolates himself at the top
date: 2024-05-06, from: Electrek Feed
Elon Musk’s no.2 at Tesla, Tom Zhu, is going back to his responsibilities as VP of China as the CEO isolates himself at the top.
https://electrek.co/2024/05/06/elon-musk-no-2-tesla-goes-back-to-china-ceo-isolates-himself-top/
Now’s Your Chance To Own This Ultra-Rare Ducati 750 Imola Desmo
date: 2024-05-06, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
It’s one of seven surviving examples of this iconic racing machine.
https://www.rideapart.com/news/718489/1972-ducati-750-imola-desmo-auction/
The Tesla Cybertruck Is Just ‘Ok’ Compared To The Competition
date: 2024-05-06, from: Inside EVs News
One of the “most controversial new vehicles you can buy” isn’t as interesting as it looks.
https://insideevs.com/news/718523/tesla-cybertruck-design-cromulent-adequate/
How to change DPI when docking with XFCE and systemd
date: 2024-05-06, updated: 2024-05-06, from: Peter Molnar blog
DPI change on docking with XFCE and systemd on Manjaro
https://petermolnar.net/article/xfce-dpi-change-xquery-profile/
Banana Pi BPI-F3 is a single-board PC with an 8-core RISC-V processor, dual Ethernet and PCIe 2.1
date: 2024-05-06, from: Liliputing
Most of Banana Pi’s single-board computers are powered by ARM-based processors. But the upcoming Banana Pi BPI-F3 has a RISC-V processor instead. The company says the SpacemiT RISC-V K1 processor selected for this board is a 64-bit, 8-core chip with single-core performance comparable to what you’d expect from a 1.3 GHz ARM Cortex-A55 processor. So the […]
The post Banana Pi BPI-F3 is a single-board PC with an 8-core RISC-V processor, dual Ethernet and PCIe 2.1 appeared first on Liliputing.
Hubble Views a Galaxy with a Voracious Black Hole
date: 2024-05-06, from: NASA breaking news
Bright, starry spiral arms surround an active galactic center in this new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of the galaxy NGC 4951. Located in the Virgo constellation, NGC 4951 is located roughly 50 million light-years away from Earth. It’s classified as a Seyfert galaxy, which means that it’s an extremely energetic type of galaxy with […]
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/hubble-views-a-galaxy-with-a-voracious-black-hole/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-05-06, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Ben Smith asks the editor of the NYT an easy question: "Why doesn’t the executive editor see it as his job to help Joe Biden win?" Because it's not my job, he might say.
https://www.semafor.com/article/05/05/2024/joe-kahn-the-newsroom-is-not-a-safe-space
Leading e-bike maker Yadea reveals new $350 e-bike at the world’s largest bike show
date: 2024-05-06, from: Electrek Feed
Yadea, the largest e-bike and e-scooter maker in the world, recently showed off a new small-format folding e-bike at China Cycle 2024, also known as the China International Bike Fair.
Radxa ROCK 5 ITX is now available (ITX motherboard with RK3588 processor and LPDDR5 memory)
date: 2024-05-06, from: Liliputing
The Radxa ROCK 5 ITX takes the guts of the Radxa ROCK 5 line of single-board computers and puts them on a slightly larger board with faster memory and support for up to four SATA drives. First announced in March, the ROCK 5 ITX is a 170 x 170mm (6.7″ x 6.7″) motherboard that should fit […]
The post Radxa ROCK 5 ITX is now available (ITX motherboard with RK3588 processor and LPDDR5 memory) appeared first on Liliputing.
Sea-Doo’s 325HP Rotax Ace Engine Is So Good, It Won an Award
date: 2024-05-06, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
This engine made me question my very purpose in life. And now it’s won an innovation award.
https://www.rideapart.com/news/718298/sea-doo-innovation-award-rotax/
Retirement anxiety is on the rise
date: 2024-05-06, from: Marketplace Morning Report
A growing number of Americans are worried they won’t have enough money to live on once they reach retirement. Plus, a $79 million fine for selling “phantom flights” at Qantas, succession plans at Berkshire Hathaway, new health care access for DACA recipients, and Boeing preps for a spacecraft launch.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/retirement-anxiety-is-on-the-rise
GoPro Files Complaint Alleging Insta360 Infringed On Several Patents
date: 2024-05-06, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
The California-based company is calling on the US International Trade Commission to make Insta360 stop selling its cameras here.
https://www.rideapart.com/news/718438/gopro-insta360-patent-itc-battle/
‘No Further Production’ Of Fisker Ocean Planned By Magna International
date: 2024-05-06, from: Inside EVs News
The company contracted to build the Fisker Ocean says in its Q1 2024 financial report that it assumes no more will be built.
https://insideevs.com/news/718548/magna-ends-fisker-ocean-production/
D-Day veteran spreads message of peace ahead of 80th anniversary
date: 2024-05-06, from: VOA News USA
Has Windows 11 really lost marketshare to Windows 10?
date: 2024-05-06, updated: 2024-05-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Users continue to give Microsoft’s latest and greatest a wide berth
According to market share figures from Statcounter, the gap between Windows 11 and Windows 10 usage is slightly growing, and not in a way we imagine Microsoft wants.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/05/06/windows_11_market_share/
BMW’s New Automated Shift Assistant Kills Motorcycle Clutch Levers
date: 2024-05-06, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
I haven’t met anyone who prefers having no clutch lever whatsoever. But BMW obviously knows something I don’t.
https://www.rideapart.com/news/718434/bmw-automated-shift-assistant-asa/
President Xi visits Europe
date: 2024-05-06, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: China’s President Xi Jinping visits Europe for the first time in five years, and trade tensions look likely to be high on the agenda. Has Sweden become a paradise for the superrich? It’s had a reputation for championing social equality, but there’s been a rapid boom in the number of Swedish multimillionaires and billionaires in recent years. The actor Will Ferrell is the latest Hollywood megastar to invest in English soccer club Leeds United — following in the footsteps of Russell Crowe.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/president-xi-visits-europe
From Texas to Brazil, a Look at Extreme Weather Events Unfolding Right Now
date: 2024-05-06, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: The Sierra Nevada received more than two feet of snow, marking the region’s snowiest day of the season • Tropical Cyclone Hidaya lost strength over the weekend • It will be about 80 degrees Fahrenheit and clear in Cape Canaveral for the launch of Boeing’s Starliner space capsule.
THE TOP FIVE
- A severe weather roundup
It feels appropriate today to begin by acknowledging the extreme weather events happening around the world right now. There are so many that spotlighting only one risks ignoring the underlying reality that climate-driven natural disasters of all kinds are becoming more frequent and severe.
Houston’s floods – More than 400 people in and around Houston, Texas, evacuated their homes over the weekend due to flooding. At least one person, a child, was killed. In one nearby county, more than 21 inches of rain fell over five days last week. The rain has tapered off but the cleanup has just begun.
Brazil’s rain – In Brazil’s southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, days of intense rain caused the Guaiba River to overflow and flood more than 340 cities, including the region’s capital of Porto Alegre. At least 78 people are dead and more than 115,000 have been forced to evacuate. One climatologist called the catastrophe “a disastrous cocktail” of climate change and the El Niño effect. “It looks like a scene out of a war,” said Rio Grande do Sul governor Eduardo Leite.
An
aerial view of Porto
AlegreRamiro
Sanchez/Getty Images
Chile’s fires – Fires in Chile’s Valparaiso region, fueled by an intense heat wave and enduring drought, have killed at least 51 people and burned more than 64,000 acres.
Kenya’s deluge – Flooding and landslides in Kenya from unrelenting rainfall have killed more than 200 people. It is still raining and the weather is forecast to worsen throughout the month of May.
Southeast Asia’s heat wave – A lengthy heat wave has shattered temperature records across Southeast Asia, forcing many schools to close. One weather historian called the heat wave “the most extreme event in world climatic history.”
- Central states brace for week of intense storms
Meanwhile, forecasters are getting nervous about a large weather system making its way across Central states that could bring severe thunderstorms, tornadoes, and giant hail starting today and lasting through Wednesday. “After enduring severe thunderstorms, including tornadoes last week, this forecast is not a welcome sight for residents of Kansas and Oklahoma especially,” wrote Andrew Freedman at Axios.
- Study links gas stove fumes to 50,000 childhood asthma cases
New research published in Science Advances finds that nitrogen dioxide (NO2) pollution from gas and propane stoves could be responsible for 50,000 U.S. cases of childhood asthma and up to 19,000 adult deaths each year. For the study, scientists from Stanford University, Harvard University, and the Central California Asthma Collaborative measured NO2 levels in more than 100 homes and created an air quality index that pulled in other data sets including cooking habits, ventilation, and home size. Their results show that NO2 pollution spreads throughout the home, and people living in spaces that are less than 800 square feet in size have four times more long-term NO2 exposure than people in homes that are larger than 3,000 square feet. Indigenous, Alaska Native, Hispanic and Black households have the highest exposure to NO2.
- Republicans move to repeal EV tax credits
In case you missed it last week, Senate Republicans put forward a bill called the “ELITE” Vehicles Act that would repeal the electric vehicle tax credit in the Inflation Reduction Act. Wyoming GOP Sen. John Barrasso, who introduced the bill, claims the EV tax credit “benefits the wealthiest of Americans.” Jameson Dow at Electrek noted that Barrasso has received $526,425 from the oil and gas industry in this election cycle. The bill stands little chance in the Senate but “puts the Biden administration on notice that the credit is at risk if the GOP wins control of Congress and the White House in November,” wrote James Bikales at E&E News.
- Philanthropic heavyweights to fund research into climate change and
diseases
Three of the world’s biggest charitable groups – the Novo Nordisk Foundation, Wellcome Trust, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – have teamed up to fund research into the overlapping crises of climate change, infectious disease, malnutrition, and antimicrobial resistance. The $300 million, three-year initiative aims to “break down barriers between often isolated areas of research,” said Novo Nordisk Foundation CEO Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen. It looks like the climate research will focus on finding “novel” solutions through better climate data, sustainable agriculture, and more resilient food systems. The partnership is specifically focused on improving outcomes for low- and middle-income countries, which are disproportionately affected by climate change. The organizations will be looking for public and private partners to expand the research project.
THE KICKER
New research suggests climate change will force some venomous snakes to migrate into new, unprepared territories.
https://heatmap.news/texas-flood-extreme-weather-climate
I survived curl up 2024
date: 2024-05-06, from: Daniel Stenberg Blog
On Friday May 3, 2024 I had several of my curl friends over for dinner in my house. An unusually warm and sunny spring day with a temperature reaching twenty degrees centigrade. The curl up 2024 weekend started excellently and the following morning we all squeezed ourselves into a conference room in downtown Stockholm. I … Continue reading I survived curl up 2024
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/05/06/i-survived-curl-up-2024/
Your Apps Are Helping The Government Spy On You
date: 2024-05-06, from: The Lever News
In this bonus episode of Lever Time, journalist Byron Tau explains the history of the modern surveillance state.
https://www.levernews.com/your-apps-are-helping-the-government-spy-on-you/
Most Accessible Protests – Solidarity with Palestine
date: 2024-05-06, from: Peoples CDC blog
When demonstrating, use our new Guide to More Accessible Protests
https://peoplescdc.org/2024/05/06/more-accessible-protests/
In 2023, investment in clean energy manufacturing shot up 70% from 2022
date: 2024-05-06, from: Electrek Feed
Booming investment in solar and battery manufacturing is rapidly becoming a powerful global economic driver, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA).
https://electrek.co/2024/05/06/2023-investment-clean-energy-manufacturing-iea/
Blinken to travel to Guatemala for regional migration conference
date: 2024-05-06, from: VOA News USA
Undersea bit barn biz offers 90-day trial of submerged server system
date: 2024-05-06, updated: 2024-05-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Testing platform for those ‘unfamiliar with the subsea environment’
Subsea Cloud is offering potential customers the chance to try out its underwater datacenter facilities for up to 90 days before making any further commitments, in a bid to attract new customers to the project.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/05/06/undersea_datacenter/
Russia plans nuclear weapon drills after angry exchange with Western officials
date: 2024-05-06, from: Associated Press, World News
It was the first time that Russia has publicly announced drills involving tactical nuclear weapons, though its strategic nuclear forces regularly hold exercises.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-nuclear-drills-b007cffdc4fc57922042a35fbe47907f
Stock buybacks are lethal, literally
date: 2024-05-06, from: Robert Reich on Substack
And they’re widening inequality. Here’s what to do about them
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/stock-buybacks-are-lethal-literally
Techie’s enthusiasm for decluttering fails to spark joy
date: 2024-05-06, updated: 2024-05-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Thankfully, luck – and a handy greybeard – came to the rescue
Who, me? Welcome once again, dear readerfolk, to the sanctuary of Who, Me? in which Register readers can recount the times when their technical skills abandoned them, even if momentarily, without fear of judgment.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/05/06/who_me/
Today in SCV History (May 6)
date: 2024-05-06, from: SCV New (TV Station)
1971 – Fort Tejon added to National Register of Historic Places. [story
https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-may-6/
UC Santa Barbara Baseball Routs UC San Diego 12-3 to Remain Undefeated at Home
date: 2024-05-06, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The Gauchos are 20-0 at Caesar Uyesaka Stadium this season.
The post UC Santa Barbara Baseball Routs UC San Diego 12-3 to Remain Undefeated at Home appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Gallup report: US ahead of China in global leadership approval
date: 2024-05-06, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/gallup-report-us-ahead-of-china-in-global-leadership-approval/7599330.html
May 5, 2024
date: 2024-05-06, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
In 1776, as British colonists in North America were contemplating how to construct a new nation, Massachusetts lawyer John Adams famously wrote to friends about the relationship between government and the law. A republic, he wrote, “is an Empire of Laws and not of Men: and therefore…that particular Arrangement…which is best calculated to Secure an exact and impartial Execution of the Laws, is the best Republic.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-5-2024
Biden to host Jordan’s King Abdullah for White House talks
date: 2024-05-06, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/biden-to-host-jordan-s-king-abdullah-for-white-house-talks/7599310.html
Germany points finger at Fancy Bear for widespread 2023 hacks, DDoS attacks
date: 2024-05-06, updated: 2024-05-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
ALSO: Microsoft promises to git gud on cybersecurity; unqualified attackers are targeting your water systems, and more
infosec in brief It was just around a year ago that a spate of allegedly Russian-orchestrated cyberattacks hit government agencies in Germany, and now German officials claim to know for a fact who did it: APT28, or Fancy Bear, a Russian threat actor linked to the GRU intelligence service.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/05/06/infosec_in_brief/
Daily EV Recap: 10,000 ton electric container ship
date: 2024-05-06, from: Electrek Feed
Listen to a recap of the top stories of the day from Electrek. Quick Charge is now available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn and…
https://electrek.co/2024/05/05/daily-ev-recap-10000-ton-electric-container-ship/
Google to relocate some US jobs to India and Mexico
date: 2024-05-06, updated: 2024-05-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
PLUS: Taiwan’s subsea cables, Paytm says goodbye to its CEO, China uses WhatsApp despite roadblocks, and more.
ASIA IN BRIEF Google announced the layoff of 200 of its core team professionals last week while moving some roles to India and Mexico, according to reports.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/05/06/apac_in_brief/
Shell casings found after reports of shooting
date: 2024-05-06, from: The Signal
Shell casings were found at the scene of a reported shooting on Valle Del Oro and Via Canon in Newhall on Sunday evening, according to Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station officials. Deputies responded to reports of a shooting incident involving a “male Hispanic pointing a firearm and shot approximately four to five times and then […]
The post <strong>Shell casings found after reports of shooting </strong> appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/05/shell-casings-found-after-reports-of-shooting/
Both Palestine and Israel Should Be Free
date: 2024-05-06, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Students can be “social change trailblazers,” but not if their teachers encourage a direction for that trail that exacerbates toxic polarization.
The post Both Palestine and Israel Should Be Free appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/05/05/both-palestine-and-israel-should-be-free/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-05-06, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Poll: "Is Twitter is still the place of record?"
https://twitter.com/davewiner/status/1787284072349258158
Review | Willie Nelson’s Still Got a Show to Play at Age 91
date: 2024-05-06, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Singing “Don’t Bury Me, I’ve Got a Show to Play” at the Santa Barbara Bowl, the American icon plays on.
The post Review | Willie Nelson’s Still Got a Show to Play at Age 91 appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/05/05/review-willie-nelsons-still-got-a-show-to-play-at-age-91/
Republicans introduce bill that would hand EV lead to China
date: 2024-05-06, from: Electrek Feed
Republicans have introduced a bill to eliminate the US EV tax credit in the Inflation Reduction Act, with the effect of slowing US progress on EV manufacturing, thus handing the lead in EV manufacturing to China.
https://electrek.co/2024/05/05/republicans-introduce-bill-that-would-hand-us-ev-lead-to-china/
Students, faculty from encampment barred from entering campus
date: 2024-05-05, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Some faculty members alleged that restrictions placed on their entrances were on the basis of race and ethnicity.
The post Students, faculty from encampment barred from entering campus appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/05/05/students-faculty-from-encampment-barred-from-entering-campus/
Episode 131 - Computer… Books?
date: 2024-05-05, from: Advent of Computing
I’ve been feeling like rambling, so it’s time for a classic ramble. This time we are looking at the origins of books about computers. More specifically, computer books targeted at a general audience. Along the way we stumble into the first public disclosure of digital computers, the first intentionally unimportant machine, and wild speculation about the future of mechanical brains.
No sources listed this time, because I want the journey to be a surprise!
https://adventofcomputing.libsyn.com/episode-131-computer-books
Record number of EV chargers installed in the UK last quarter
date: 2024-05-05, from: Electrek Feed
A record number of public electric vehicle charging stations were installed in the UK this quarter, as charging companies struggle to keep up with the growing number of plugin cars on British roads.
https://electrek.co/2024/05/05/record-number-of-ev-chargers-installed-in-the-uk-last-quarter/
FreeWire closes its HQ and lays off just about everyone
date: 2024-05-05, from: Electrek Feed
Novel EV fast charging solution FreeWire has announced plans to close its Newark corporate headquarters and lay off virtually all of its employees.
https://electrek.co/2024/05/05/freewire-closes-its-hq-and-lays-off-just-about-everyone/
Mexican authorities: Thieves killed American, 2 Australians to steal their truck
date: 2024-05-05, from: VOA News USA
Mexico City — Thieves killed two Australians and an American on a surfing trip to Mexico to steal their truck, particularly because they wanted the tires, authorities said Sunday.
Baja California state prosecutors released grisly details of the slayings but have not yet officially confirmed the identity of the bodies. They said family members of the victims are viewing the bodies to see if they can be identified by sight.
The corpses were decomposing after the thieves dumped them into a remote, 15-meter deep well. If relatives can’t identify them, further tests will be conducted. The well also contained a fourth cadaver that had been there much longer.
“The probability that it’s them is very high,” said chief state prosecutor Maria Elena Andrade Ramirez, noting the corpses still appeared to be identifiable by sight.
The three men went missing last weekend during a camping and surfing trip, posting idyllic photos on social media of waves and isolated beaches along a stretch of coast south of the city of Ensenada.
But Andrade Ramirez described the moments of terror that ended the trip for brothers Jake and Callum Robinson from Australia and American Jack Carter Rhoad.
She said the killers drove by and saw the foreigners’ pickup truck and tents, and wanted to steal their tires.
“Surely, they resisted,” she said of the victims, and the thieves shot them to death.
The thieves then went to what she called “a site that is extremely hard to get to” and dumped their bodies into a well they apparently were familiar with. She said investigators were not ruling out the possibility the same suspects also dumped the first, earlier body in the well as part of their thefts.
“They may have been looking for trucks in this area,” Andrade Ramirez said.
The site where the bodies were discovered near the township of Santo Tomas was near the remote seaside area where the missing men’s tents and truck were found Thursday along the coast. From their last photo posts, the trip looked perfect. But even experienced local expats are questioning whether it is safe to camp along the largely deserted coast anymore.
The moderator of the local Talk Baja internet forum, who has lived in the area for almost two decades, wrote in an editorial Saturday that “the reality is, the dangers of traveling to and camping in remote areas are outweighing the benefits anymore.”
Baja California prosecutors had said they were questioning three people in the case. On Friday, the office said the three had been arrested on charges of a crime equivalent to kidnapping, but that was before the bodies were found. It was unclear if they might face more charges.
At least one of the suspects was believed to have directly participated in the killings.
Last week, the missing Australians’ mother, Debra Robinson, posted on a local community Facebook page an appeal for help in finding her sons. Robinson said Callum and Jake had not been heard from since April 27. They had booked accommodations in the nearby city of Rosarito.
Robinson said one of her sons, Callum, was diabetic. She also mentioned that the American who was with them was named Jack Carter Rhoad, but the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City did not immediately confirm that. The U.S. State Department said it was aware of reports of a U.S. citizen missing in Baja but gave no further details.
In 2015, two Australian surfers, Adam Coleman and Dean Lucas, were killed in western Sinaloa state, across the Gulf of California — also known as the Sea of Cortez — from the Baja peninsula. Authorities said they were victims of highway bandits. Three suspects were arrested in that case.
Thanks to our outgoing sponsor: JMP
date: 2024-05-05, from: OS News
We’d like to thank this past week’s sponsor JMP for sponsoring OSNews. As a reminder, JMP is a fully FOSS service providing a way to get a real phone number that operates over the internet using XMPP. They provide numbers in the USA and Canada with everything you need to access SMS/MMS/etc. and voice calls using your XMPP (or SIP) clients of choice across all your devices. They are committed to growing the use of open communications technology such as XMPP, ultimately working to help people move their communication off the unencrypted telephone network and onto the federated, encrypted, and diverse Jabber network. Once again, thanks to JMP for sponsoring OSNews!
https://www.osnews.com/story/139575/thanks-to-our-outgoing-sponsor-jmp/
Why I run a BSD on a PC
date: 2024-05-05, from: OS News
But the biggest differential factor between BSDs and GNU/Linux is the way it is structured. In Linux, all components are designed to work together, but are completely separate. You’ve got the kernel, init systems, multimedia daemons, userland, bootloader, virtualization and containerization mechanisms, package managers, and so on. They are all separate projects with their own goals and are operated by separate entities. This is why we’ve got different Linux Distributions instead of Operating System. Everyone can take the kernel, start adding components on top of it, and a few minutes later the DistroWatch is even harder to keep up with. Each BSD on the other hand is designed as single system. All components are created and developed together. Things work together perfectly, because they are designed, coded, tested and released as one. ↫ Michał Sapka As I’ve mentioned here and there over the past few weeks, I’ve been exploring the world of BSD lately, and after bouncing of FreeBSD I’ve found a very happy home on OpenBSD. Now, this doesn’t mean I’m now a full-time OpenBSD user or anything like that – Linux is the main operating system on my gaming PC, my laptop, and my workstation, and that’s not going to be changing any time soon. However, after installing, exploring, and using OpenBSD on a machine cobbled together from spare and older parts, I can definitely see the appeal. OpenBSD feels more coherent than a Linux distribution – I use Fedora KDE, if that matters – and the various lower-level systems seem to talk to each other in ways that make more intuitive sense than the individually developed systems in a Linux distribution do. Diving into the command-line interface of a Linux distribution can sometimes feel confusing because different tools use different conventions, because they’re developed by entirely different people and projects, with different ideas about how flags should work, how output should be presented, and so on. On OpenBSD, it seems much easier to carry over something you learn from one tool to the next. I simply feel more secure and knowledgeable, even if it’s still the same idiot me. The documentation plays a big role here. They’re in one place, written in a consistent style, and reference each other left and right, making it easy to find your way around to other commands or tools you haven’t yet considered using. On Linux, you’re going from one project’s documentation to another project’s documentation, and not only will the style change, the quality will also vary greatly. That’s not to say everything’s perfect on OpenBSD – it’s clearly a hardened server operating system, and its focus on security will definitely throw up annoying hurdles if you’re just trying to do workstation things. Firefox, for instance, is hobbled by strict security rules through unveil, which makes perfect sense for what OpenBSD is first and foremost trying to be, but if you’re just a regular user like me, it’s annoying that Firefox can only access ~/Downloads, or that it can’t set itself as the default browser so unless you disable that check, Firefox will keep complaining about it. Diving into Firefox and unveil is on my list, though, because you should be able to ‘fix’ this. Furthermore, while every piece of software, or an equivalent, is pretty much always available for Linux, on OpenBSD it’s more hit and miss, and it seems to take a bit longer for new releases of especially bigger software packages to get updated. I mean, there’s obviously no Steam on OpenBSD, but smaller, less well-known projects generally also don’t support OpenBSD, so you’re either going to be compiling things yourself or hope someone packages it up for OpenBSD. Then there’s the various vanity things we’ve come to expect from modern Linux distributions, like slick, fully graphical boot and shutdown sequences, detailed graphical tools for managing your packages, graphical firmware and driver managers, and so on. OpenBSD has none of these things, and while that’s no issue for me, I can see how it would throw other people off. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and the few others often kind of get lost in all the Linux, Windows, and macOS violence, and to be quite honest – I feel like many people in the BSD community seem mostly okay with that. If you’ve never spent any serious time using any of the BSDs, but you’re interested in operating systems and don’t mind spending a few hours learning how to manipulate your system through CLI tools – dive in. There’s a ton of fun to be had, and things to learn. For now, I’m continuing my exploration of OpenBSD, and if things keep going as well as they are, I may consider at least switching over the workstation in my office from Fedora KDE to OpenBSD – but I highly doubt it’ll ever make its way to my gaming desktop or my laptop.
https://www.osnews.com/story/139562/why-i-run-a-bsd-on-a-pc/
The Game of Trees version control system
date: 2024-05-05, from: OS News
Game of Trees (Got) is a version control system which prioritizes ease of use and simplicity over flexibility. Got is still under development; it is being developed on OpenBSD and its main target audience are OpenBSD developers. Got uses Git repositories to store versioned data. Git can be used for any functionality which has not yet been implemented in Got. It will always remain possible to work with both Got and Git on the same repository. ↫ Game of Trees website OpenBSD is developing Game of Trees because they want a version control system that adheres to OpenBSD coding conventions, implements various OpenBSD security practices, and uses nothing but BSD-licensed code. It’s important to note, as its developers make very clear, that GoT is not in any way intended as a replacement for git.
https://www.osnews.com/story/139570/the-game-of-trees-version-control-system/
As US spotlights those missing or dead in Native communities, prosecutors work to solve their cases
date: 2024-05-05, from: VOA News USA
Albuquerque, New Mexico — It was a frigid winter morning when authorities found a Native American man dead on a remote gravel road in western New Mexico. He was lying on his side, with only one sock on, his clothes gone and his shoes tossed in the snow.
There were trails of blood on both sides of his body and it appeared he had been struck in the head.
Investigators retraced the man’s steps, gathering security camera footage that showed him walking near a convenience store miles away in Gallup, an economic hub in an otherwise rural area bordered on one side by the Navajo Nation and Zuni Pueblo on the other.
Court records said the footage and cell phone records showed the victim — a Navajo man identified only as John Doe — was “on a collision course” with the man who would ultimately be accused of killing him.
A grand jury has indicted a man from Zuni Pueblo on a charge of second-degree murder in the Jan. 18 death, and prosecutors say more charges are likely as he is the prime suspect in a series of crimes targeting Native American men in Gallup, Zuni and Albuquerque. Investigators found several wallets, cell phones and clothing belonging to other men when searching his vehicle and two residences.
As people gathered around the nation on Sunday to spotlight the troubling number of disappearances and killings in Indian Country, authorities say the New Mexico case represents the kind of work the U.S. Department of Justice had aspired to when establishing its Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons outreach program last summer.
Special teams of assistant U.S. attorneys and coordinators have been tasked with focusing on MMIP cases. Their goal: Improve communication and coordination across federal, tribal, state and local jurisdictions in hopes of bridging the gaps that have made solving violent crimes in Indian Country a generational challenge.
Some of the new federal prosecutors were participating in MMIP Awareness Day events. From the Arizona state capitol to a cultural center in Albuquerque and the Qualla Boundary in North Carolina, marches, symposiums, art exhibitions and candlelight vigils were planned for May 5, which is the birthday of Hanna Harris, who was only 21 when she was killed on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in Montana in 2013.
It was an emotional day in Albuquerque, where family members and advocates participated in a prayer walk. They chanted: “What do we want? Answers! What do we want? Justice!” There were tears and long embraces as they shared their stories and frustrations. They talked about feeling forgotten and the lack of resources in Native communities.
Geraldine Toya of Jemez Pueblo marched with other family members to bring awareness to the death of her daughter Shawna Toya in 2021. She said she and her husband are artists who make pottery and never dreamed they would end up being investigators in an effort to determine what happened to their daughter.
“Our journey has been rough, but you know what, we’re going to make this journey successful for all of our people that are here in this same thing that we’re struggling through right now,” she said, vowing to support other families through their heartbreak as they seek justice.
Alex Uballez, the U.S. attorney for the District of New Mexico, told The Associated Press on Friday that the outreach program is starting to pay dividends.
“Providing those bridges between those agencies is critical to seeing the patterns that affect all of our communities,” Uballez said. “None of our borders that we have drawn prevents the spillover of impacts on communities — across tribal communities, across states, across the nation, across international borders.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Eliot Neal oversees MMIP cases for a region spanning New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah and Nevada.
Having law enforcement agencies and attorneys talking to each other can help head off other crimes that are often precursors to deadly violence. The other pieces of the puzzle are building relationships with Native American communities and making the justice system more accessible to the public, Neal said.
Part of Neal’s work includes reviewing old cases: time-consuming work that can involve tracking down witnesses and resubmitting evidence for testing.
“We’re trying to flip that script a little bit and give those cases the time and attention they deserve,” he said, adding that communicating with family members about the process is a critical component for the MMIP attorneys and coordinators.
The DOJ over the past year also has awarded $268 million in grants to tribal justice systems for handling child abuse cases, combating domestic and sexual violence and bolstering victim services.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Bree Black Horse was dressed in red as she was sworn in Thursday during a ceremony in Yakima, Washington. The color is synonymous with raising awareness about the disproportionate number of Indigenous people who have been victims of violence.
She prosecutes MMIP cases in a five-state region across California and the Pacific Northwest to Montana. Her caseload is in the double digits, and she’s working with advocacy groups to identify more unresolved cases and open lines of communication with law enforcement.
An enrolled member of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and a lawyer for more than a decade, Black Horse said having 10 assistant U.S. attorneys and coordinators focusing solely on MMIP cases is unprecedented.
“This is an issue that has touched not only my community but my friends and my family,” she said. “I see this as a way to help make sure that our future generations, our young people don’t experience these same kinds of disparities and this same kind of trauma.”
In New Mexico, Uballez acknowledged the federal government moves slowly and credited tribal communities with raising their voices, consistently showing up to protest and putting pressure on politicians to improve public safety in tribal communities.
Still, he and Neal said it will take a paradigm shift to undo the public perception that nothing is being done.
The man charged in the New Mexico case, Labar Tsethlikai, appeared in court Wednesday and pleaded not guilty while standing shackled next to his public defender. A victim advocate from Uballez’s office was there, too, sitting with victims’ family members.
Tsethlikai’s attorney argued that evidence had yet to be presented tying her client to the alleged crimes spelled out in court documents. Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew McGinley argued that no conditions of release would keep the community safe, pointing to cell phone data and DNA evidence allegedly showing Tsethlikai had preyed on people who were homeless or in need of alcohol so he could satisfy his sexual desires.
Tsethlikai will remain in custody pending trial as authorities continue to investigate. Court documents list at least 10 other victims along with five newly identified potential victims. McGinley said prosecutors wanted to focus on a few of the cases “to get him off the street” and prevent more violence.
X.Org on NetBSD: the state of things
date: 2024-05-05, from: OS News
The big question – does all this have a future? The good news is that all new hardware has generic support in X. Someone writes either a modesetting kernel driver or a classical wsdisplay kernel driver and they will be automatically supported by the associated drivers in X. The bad news is that to have applications running we require access to a larger open source ecosystem, and that ecosystem has a lot of churn and is easily distracted by shiny new squirrels. The process of upstreaming stuff to X.Org is an ongoing process, but it’s likely we’ll run into things that will never be suitable for upstream. ↫ Nia Alarie on the NetBSD blog I had no idea NetBSD did such heavy customisations of its X.Org implementation, many of which have never made their way upstream. The project also maintains support for several older GPUs, uses its own input driver, and more – it’s quite impressive.
https://www.osnews.com/story/139568/x-org-on-netbsd-the-state-of-things/
Dillo 3.1.0 released: first release since 2015
date: 2024-05-05, from: OS News
Do any of you remember the browser Dillo? The project’s been through a rough few years after the main developer of the layout engine sadly passed away, the lead developer disappeared from the project, the dillo.org domain was lost and taken over by spammers – but now there’s new people at the helm, and the browser just released it first new version since 2015. Dillo 3.1.0 brings a whole host of new features and improvements. Dillo is open source, uses the FLTK toolkit, and runs on Linux, BSD, MacOS, Windows (Cygwin), and more.
https://www.osnews.com/story/139566/dillo-3-1-0-released-first-release-since-2015/
EV Vs. ICE: How A Tesla Cybertruck Tows Against Diesel Ram Cummins, Ford F-150 XLT
date: 2024-05-05, from: Inside EVs News
The Fast Lane Truck compares the Tesla Cybertruck against it’s ICE and EV competition.
https://insideevs.com/news/718515/ford-f-150-ram-cummins-tesla-cybertruck/
EagleFiler 1.9.14
date: 2024-05-05, from: TidBITS blog
https://tidbits.com/watchlist/eaglefiler-1-9-14/
DEVONagent Pro 3.11.8
date: 2024-05-05, from: TidBITS blog
https://tidbits.com/watchlist/devonagent-3-11-8/
More storms move through Houston area; hundreds already rescued from floodwaters
date: 2024-05-05, from: VOA News USA
Houston, Texas — More storms were moving through the already saturated Houston area on Sunday, where flooding from heavy rains has led to the rescue of hundreds of people from homes, rooftops and roads.
“It’s going to be raining through the day and some of the storms could be producing the heavier downpours,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Hayley Adams.
Over the last week, areas near Lake Livingston, located northeast of Houston, have gotten upwards of 50 centimeters of rain, she said, while there has been as much as 30 centimeters of rain in that period in areas of northeastern Harris County, the nation’s third-largest county that includes Houston.
Adams said the storms coming through Sunday were expected to bring up to 8 centimeters of rainfall, with up to 20 centimeters possible in some areas.
“It’s going to keep rising this way,” said Miguel Flores Jr., who lives in the northeast Houston neighborhood of Kingwood. “We don’t know how much more. We’re just preparing for the worst.”
Houston authorities have not reported any deaths or injuries as a wide region from Houston to rural East Texas has been swamped.
Flooding forces evacuations
Most weekends Flores’ father, Miguel Flores Sr., is mowing his huge backyard on a 1-hectare lot behind his home in Kingwood. But on Saturday, he and his family loaded several vehicles with clothes, small appliances and other items.
Water from the San Jacinto River already had swallowed his backyard and was continuing to rise, from about 30 centimeters high in the yard Friday to about 1.2 meters the following day.
As storms forced numerous high-water rescues, including some from the rooftops of flooded homes, officials redoubled urgent instructions for residents in low-lying areas to evacuate, warning the worst was still to come.
Greg Moss, 68, stood late Saturday afternoon by a golf cart as he eyed the several centimeters of water covering the road that leads to his home in Channelview, a community in eastern Harris County near the San Jacinto River.
Moss had managed to pack up many of his belongings and leave before the road flooded Saturday.
“I would be stuck for four days,” Moss said. “So now at least I can go get something to eat.”
He moved his belongings and vehicle to a neighbor’s home, where he will stay until the waters recede. Moss said he is not worried his home will flood because it’s located on higher ground.
Houston prone to flooding
Houston is one of the most flood-prone metro areas in the United States. The city of more than 2 million people has long experience dealing with devastating weather.
Hurricane Harvey in 2017 dumped historic rainfall that flooded thousands of homes and resulted in more than 60,000 rescues by government rescue personnel across Harris County.
The greater Houston area covers about 25,900 square kilometers, a footprint slightly bigger than New Jersey. It is crisscrossed by about 2,700 kilometers of channels, creeks and bayous draining into the Gulf of Mexico, about 80 kilometers southeast of downtown.
The system of bayous and reservoirs was built to drain heavy rains, but the engineering initially designed nearly 100 years ago has struggled to keep up with the city’s growth and bigger storms.
Husband and wife Aron Brown, 45, and Jamie Brown, 41, were two of the many residents who drove or walked to watch the rising waters near a flooded intersection close to the San Jacinto River. Nearby restaurants and a gas station were beginning to flood.
What’s expected next
Rain in the area is expected to taper off by evening, said Adams, the National Weather Service meteorologist. But next up, residents recovering from the floods will have the heat and humidity to contend with.
With a combination of the lingering moisture from the rains and temperatures upwards of 32 C, the area may be looking at heat index values in the triple digits this week, she said.
“We want people to be mindful of the increasing temperatures, and heat exhaustion, heat stress,” she said.
Tackling Textiles at the Santa Barbara Dump
date: 2024-05-05, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Microfibers from clothes are big polluters.
The post Tackling Textiles at the Santa Barbara Dump appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/05/05/tackling-textiles-at-the-santa-barbara-dump/
The Sam Altman Playbook
date: 2024-05-05, from: Gary Marcus blog
Fear, The Denial of Uncertainties, and Hype
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/the-sam-altman-playbook
Pro-Palestinian protests in US could impact 2024 election
date: 2024-05-05, from: VOA News USA
Despite the fact that many of their encampments at university campuses have been dismantled, pro-Palestinian demonstrators in the United States are standing their ground. If the protests continue, some analysts say they could have an impact on the 2024 presidential election. VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias explains.
https://www.voanews.com/a/pro-palestinian-protests-in-us-could-impact-2024-election/7598844.html
From immigration to citizenship: When is an immigrant allowed to vote in a US election?
date: 2024-05-05, from: VOA News USA
Can immigrants vote in U.S. elections? The answer is — not until they become naturalized citizens. Naturalization is a lengthy process that begins with obtaining a green card, also known as a permanent resident card. VOA’s Aline Barros explains the process.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-05-05, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Thousands of Israelis take to streets of Tel Aviv to demand cease-fire and Netanyahu's resignation.
How Open Hardware Empowers Users
date: 2024-05-05, from: Tilde.news
https://www.ifixit.com/News/94927/how-open-hardware-empowers-users
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-05-05, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Mark Cuban’s AI Bootcamps: Building Wealth Through ChatGPT.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-cuban-ai-bootcamps-building-110208972.html
Man detained at gunpoint in Canyon Country
date: 2024-05-05, from: The Signal
A man was detained at gunpoint on suspicion of domestic violence on the 27500 block of Sierra Highway in Canyon Country on Sunday morning, according to the Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station. “The suspect had left the residence prior to us getting there,” said Sgt. Johnny Gillespie, adding that authorities had received the initial report […]
The post Man detained at gunpoint in Canyon Country appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/05/man-detained-at-gunpoint-in-canyon-country/
Donohoe, Kurowski Named 2024 SCV Man, Woman of the Year
date: 2024-05-05, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Dale Donohoe and Kim Kurowski were named the Santa Clarita Valley’s top volunteers of the year at the 2024 SCV Man and Woman of the Year dinner celebration held Friday, May 3 at the Hyatt Regency Valencia. The event also honored all of the 17 men and 17 woman nominated for the award
https://scvnews.com/donohoe-kurowski-named-2024-scv-man-woman-of-the-year/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-05-05, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
U.S. put a hold on an ammunition shipment to Israel.
https://www.axios.com/2024/05/05/israel-us-ammunition-shipment-hold
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-05-05, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Amazing the issues Republicans bring to elections. Now we’re debating what to do when you hate your dog.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/05/us/politics/kristi-noem-biden-dog.html
Wrong Place for Plastic
date: 2024-05-05, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
While I support the restoration of native habitat at Shalawa Meadow / Hammond’s Meadow for the sake of biodiversity, I strongly oppose installing construction-grade plastic netting over this public open space, which is adjacent to shore and reef habitats.
The post Wrong Place for Plastic appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/05/05/wrong-place-for-plastic/
‘The Fall Guy’ gives Hollywood a muted kickoff with $28.5M
date: 2024-05-05, from: VOA News USA
New York — “The Fall Guy,” the Ryan Gosling-led, action-comedy ode to stunt performers, opened below expectations with $28.5 million, according to studio estimates Sunday, providing a lukewarm start to a summer movie season that’s very much to be determined for Hollywood.
The Universal Pictures release opened on a weekend that Marvel has regularly dominated with $100 million-plus launches. (In 2023, that was “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” with a $118 million debut.) But last year’s strikes jumbled this year’s movie calendar; “Deadpool & Wolverine,” originally slated to open this weekend, is now debuting in July.
So in place of a superhero kickoff, the summer launch went to a movie about the stunt performers who anonymously sacrifice their bodies for the kind of action sequences blockbusters are built on. Going into the weekend, forecasts had the film opening $30 million to $40 million.
“The Fall Guy,” directed by former stuntman and “Deadpool 2” helmer David Leitch, rode into the weekend with the momentum of glowing reviews and the buzz of a SXSW premiere. But it will need sustained interest to merit its $130 million production budget. It added $25.4 million in overseas markets.
Working in its favor for a long run: strong audience scores (an “A-” CinemaScore) and good reviews (83% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes). Jim Orr, distribution chief for Universal, believes things line up well for “The Fall Guy” in the coming weeks.
“We had a very solid opening,” said Orr. “We’re looking forward to a very long, very robust, very successful run throughout the domestic box office for literally weeks if not months to come.”
But the modest start for “The Fall Guy” hints at larger concerns for the film industry. Superhero films haven’t been quite the box-office behemoth they once were, leading studios to search for fresher alternatives. “The Fall Guy” seemed to check all the boxes, with extravagant action sequences, one of the hottest stars in the business, a director with a track-record for crowd pleasers and very good reviews.
But instead, the opening for “The Fall Guy,” loosely based on the 1980s TV series, only emphasized that the movie business is likely to struggle to rekindle the fervor of last year’s “Barbenheimer” summer. “The Fall Guy” stars one from each: Gosling, in his first post-Ken role, and Emily Blunt, of “Oppenheimer.” Both were Oscar nominated.
“It’s going to be a very interesting, nontraditional summer this year,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for Comscore.
In part because of last year’s work stoppages, there are fewer big movies hitting theaters. Expectations are that the total summer box office will be closer to $3 billion than the $4 billion that’s historically been generated.
“The summer season is just getting started, so let’s give ‘The Fall Guy’ a chance to build that momentum over time. It’s a different type of summer kickoff film,” said Dergarabedian. “There’s always huge expectations placed on any film that kicks off the summer movie season, but this isn’t your typical summer movie season.”
In a surprise, No. 2 at the box office went to the Walt Disney Co. rerelease of “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.” The first episode to George Lucas’ little-loved prequels collected $8.1 million over the weekend, 25 years after “Phantom Menace” grossed $1 billion.
Last week’s top film, the Zendaya tennis drama “Challengers,” slid to third place with $7.6 million in its second week. That was a sold hold for the Amazon MGM release, directed by Luca Guadagnino, dipping 49% from its first weekend.
The Sony Screen Gems supernatural horror film “Tarot” also opened nationwide. It debuted with $6.5 million, a decent enough start for a low-budget release but another example of horror not quite performing this year as it has the last few years.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.
“The Fall Guy,” $28.5 million.
“Star Wars: The Phantom Menace,” $8.1 million.
“Challengers,” $7.6 million.
“Tarot,” $6.5 million.
“Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” $4.5 million.
“Civil War,” $3.6 million.
“Unsung Hero,” $3 million.
“Kung Fu Panda 4,” $2.4 million.
“Abigail,” $2.3 million.
“Ghostbuster: Frozen Empire,” $1.8 million.
https://www.voanews.com/a/the-fall-guy-gives-hollywood-a-muted-kickoff-with-28-5m-/7598787.html
Valencia, West Ranch headed to CIF title showdown
date: 2024-05-05, from: The Signal
The stage is now officially set for the Foothill League/Santa Clarita Valley CIF title volleyball match. West Ranch and Valencia will face off at least one more time this season on Saturday in the CIF Southern Section Division 4 championship game. The two could also potentially meet again in the state tournament. The meeting marks […]
The post Valencia, West Ranch headed to CIF title showdown appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/05/valencia-west-ranch-headed-to-cif-title-showdown/
Planning the perfect summer vacation in 2024
date: 2024-05-05, from: The Signal
Research reveals a fascinating truth: The anticipation of a vacation can boost your happiness, perhaps even as much as the vacation itself. Whether you’re seeking serenity on sun-kissed beaches or cultural immersion and adventures in exotic locales, planning a stay full of memories is an integral part of the overall experience. Here are 5 tips […]
The post Planning the perfect summer vacation in 2024 appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/05/planning-the-perfect-summer-vacation-in-2024/
Sometimes, moms need a time-out
date: 2024-05-05, from: The Signal
Are you still looking for a way to spice up Mother’s Day? How about a time-out? “What?” you say. Time-outs may be torturous for young children eager to get up and go, but alone time may sound like paradise to busy mothers. Moms who need a break during or after a long day (like Mother’s […]
The post Sometimes, moms need a time-out appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/05/sometimes-moms-need-a-time-out-2/
Ten years ago Microsoft bought Nokia’s phone unit – then killed it as a tax write-off
date: 2024-05-05, updated: 2024-05-06, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
When bad management meets bad software, even great hardware is useless
Retrospective Ten years ago Microsoft absorbed the handset division of Nokia. The world’s biggest operating systems vendor was going mobile in a big way, and buying the erstwhile world leader in mobile phones to ensure its success.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/05/05/microsoft_nokia_anniversary/
Mother’s Day in the Santa Clarita Valley
date: 2024-05-05, from: The Signal
If you are a server in a local restaurant, you know the most dreaded day in the restaurant business is fast approaching, Mother’s Day, Sunday, May 12. A National Restaurant Association survey finds that 40% of adults will use a restaurant to treat mom to a special Mother’s Day meal. Mother’s Day was enshrined as […]
The post Mother’s Day in the Santa Clarita Valley appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/05/mothers-day-in-the-santa-clarita-valley/
The most popular menswear items for summer
date: 2024-05-05, from: The Signal
By Luca Hogan New research reveals this summer’s most sought-after menswear items in America. The study, conducted by clothing experts boohooMAN, analyzed Google search data to determine the most in-demand menswear items across the country. Men’s Shorts Men’s shorts have been named this summer’s most sought-after menswear item, with 17,7442 average monthly searches across […]
The post The most popular menswear items for summer appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/05/the-most-popular-menswear-items-for-summer/
Out of this world: Relay for Life celebrates ‘May the Cure Be With You’
date: 2024-05-05, from: The Signal
The American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life of Santa Clarita Valley looped around for its 26th year as a community staple on Saturday at Central Park. With the event title being “May the Cure Be With You,” embodying the “Star Wars” theme on “May the Fourth,” thousands of people participated to help meet the $300,000 […]
The post Out of this world: Relay for Life celebrates ‘May the Cure Be With You’ appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/05/out-of-this-world-relay-for-life-celebrates-may-the-cure-be-with-you/
What I’m telling my graduating students
date: 2024-05-05, from: Robert Reich on Substack
Friends, My students are graduating at a tremulous time. The largest campus protest movement of the 21st century. The first criminal trial of a former U.S. president. The most restrictive abortion laws in the nation. Two horrific wars. All of this coming after the first pandemic in living memory, one that claimed the lives of a million Americans. And after the first attack on the U.S. Capitol in history, provoked by the first president who refused to accept electoral defeat.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/what-im-telling-my-graduating-students
American Culture Wars, Chinese Imports: Why Australia’s EV Market Is So Fascinating
date: 2024-05-05, from: Inside EVs News
Electric utes when, though?
https://insideevs.com/news/718504/australia-ev-market-overview-2024/
The Curious About Everything Newsletter #38
date: 2024-05-05, from: Curious about everything blog
The many interesting things I read in April 2024
https://jodiettenberg.substack.com/p/thirty-eight
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-05-05, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Update on SwiftGodot and strict concurrency.
The easy stuff is gone, but the remaining stuff is hard. I could brute force my way to the end, but goal is not to just have it build, I want to make sure that my users can rely on the guarantees and be able to benefit from this additional level of safety.
So the next step will take some time to complete, as many of these will require some research into some Godot features.
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/112389354927769609
Discontinued Tesla Model Y RWD Can Get 40-60 More Miles Unlocked
date: 2024-05-05, from: Inside EVs News
Tesla’s Elon Musk revealed that unlocking the full battery capacity will cost $1,500 to $2,000.
https://insideevs.com/news/718482/discontinued-tesla-modely-rwd-range-unlock/
Pro-Palestinian protest ends quietly at University of Southern California
date: 2024-05-05, from: VOA News USA
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-05-05, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
I asked ChatGPT how to develop a simple bridge between a writing app via ActivityPub.
https://chatgpt.com/share/3a37d2dd-a442-4d8c-b314-0c934b87f5e1?oai-dm=1
Arctic Cat Recalls 16,000 Snowmobiles For Laceration Potential
date: 2024-05-05, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
The drive clutch can break, fragment, and then explode.
https://www.rideapart.com/news/718436/arctic-cat-snowmobile-recall-laceration/
DPS, LAPD conduct early-morning sweep of ‘Gaza Solidarity Occupation’
date: 2024-05-05, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Protesters have vacated the encampment, and LAPD reported no arrests made during the sweep.
The post DPS, LAPD conduct early-morning sweep of ‘Gaza Solidarity Occupation’ appeared first on Daily Trojan.
What Elon Musk’s favorite game tells us about him
date: 2024-05-05, from: Dave Karpf’s blog
A review, of sorts, of Polytopia.
https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/what-elon-musks-favorite-game-tells
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-05-05, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Sammy’s Roumanian Is Finally Reopening on the Lower East Side.
https://ny.eater.com/2024/4/2/24118844/sammys-roumanian-opening-stanton-street
dte - text editor
date: 2024-05-05, from: Tilde.news
https://craigbarnes.gitlab.io/dte/
Turned Off By Tesla? Consider A Nissan Ariya Or Toyota BZ4X
date: 2024-05-05, from: Inside EVs News
While these electric crossovers are not best in class, cheap leasing options make them attractive alternatives to the Model Y.
https://insideevs.com/news/718485/nissan-ariya-toyota-bz4x-comparison/
End-to-end encryption may be the bane of cops, but they can’t close that Pandora’s Box
date: 2024-05-05, updated: 2024-05-05, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Internet Society’s Robin Wilton tells us the war on privacy won’t be won by the plod
interview Police can complain all they like about strong end-to-end encryption making their jobs harder, but it doesn’t matter because the technology is here and won’t go away. …
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/05/05/e2ee_police/
David Hegg | To Those Who Are Dealing in Death
date: 2024-05-05, from: The Signal
By David Hegg My normal writing schedule, which involves preparing this column a week in advance, means I’m often lagging behind the news cycle. This sometimes causes me to wonder if I should wait until the last minute to offer my thoughts. But recently, I’ve found that this approach allows me to avoid knee-jerk reactions […]
The post David Hegg | To Those Who Are Dealing in Death appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/05/david-hegg-to-those-who-are-dealing-in-death/
Rob Kerchner | When It’s Time to Switch
date: 2024-05-05, from: The Signal
When is it time to switch parties? Here are 20 telltale signs: 1) If your fellow voters march for terrorists who use babies as bargaining chips … 2) If your party went nuts over fake “Russia collusion” while burying a real and incriminating laptop … 3) If your fellow voters found Jan. 6 unconscionable, but […]
The post Rob Kerchner | When It’s Time to Switch appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/05/rob-kerchner-when-its-time-to-switch/
It’s the Water, Innit?
date: 2024-05-05, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
With this many thousand dwellings for this many thousands of people, will there be enough water when the next 10-year drought comes along?
The post It’s the Water, Innit? appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/05/05/its-the-water-innit/
Triumph Bags Title Sponsorship For 2024 AMA Adventure Riding Series
date: 2024-05-05, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
The 2024 Triumph Adventure Riding Series is open to riders of all skill levels.
https://www.rideapart.com/news/718297/triumph-title-sponsor-ama-adv-riding-series-2024/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-05-05, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Jimmy Butler Slams Knicks.
https://www.si.com/nba/knicks/jimmy-butler-slams-new-york-knicks-calls-out-josh-hart
Driver dies after ramming car into White House gate
date: 2024-05-05, from: VOA News USA
Washington — A driver died after crashing a car into the exterior gate of the White House late Saturday, the US Secret Service said.
“Shortly before 10:30pm a vehicle traveling at a high speed collided with an outer perimeter gate on the White House complex,” the service said in a statement on social media platform X, adding there was “no threat” to the White House itself.
Officers arriving at the scene “attempted to render aid to the driver who was discovered deceased,” the statement said.
The Secret Service, along with the police and fire departments of the District of Columbia, have launched an investigation into the fatal crash, according to Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi.
He added there was “no threat or public safety implications”.
In January, authorities detained another person who crashed a vehicle into the exterior gate of the same complex.
The White House has seen a string of high-profile trespassing incidents in recent years, prompting the construction of a higher, tougher metal fence around the iconic mansion’s perimeter in 2020.
https://www.voanews.com/a/driver-dies-after-ramming-car-into-white-house-gate-/7598546.html
The kitchen s(l)ink post
date: 2024-05-05, from: Manu - I write blog
<p>The more I read and think about the state of the web the more I’m convinced the only way out of this mess is if we all collectively do something to make things better. By <em>we</em> I mean the people who care about the open web, about personal sites, about sharing outside social media. I have a post coming focused on curation but today I just want to do something very simple and that is sharing a bunch of links I think are interesting. I’m probably going to do this more often moving forward because it’s something I personally appreciate when other people do. So without further ado, here’s a bunch of links:</p>- We Need To Rewild The Internet
- Heat Death of the Internet
- Men Use Fake Livestream Apps With AI Audiences to Hit on Women (this one made my sad for humanity)
- Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
- La Festa dei Ceri (Sharing the most recent post but I’m enjoying reading about Peter’s experience here in Italy)
- Towards a quieter, friendlier web
- All of foofaraw newsletters
Enjoy the Sunday everyone.
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https://manuelmoreale.com/@/page/QW85u7f4HaqBtm0R
Russia launches drones as Ukraine marks third Easter at war
date: 2024-05-05, from: Associated Press, World News
Ukraine’s air force said Sunday that Russia had launched 24 Shahed drones, of which 23 had been shot down by air defenses.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-easter-1702fb361c6e72fcf9d93f46ac89625e
Sunday caption contest: Protest?
date: 2024-05-05, from: Robert Reich on Substack
And last week’s winner
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/sunday-caption-contest-protest
Airlines Want To Keep The Money They Owe You
date: 2024-05-05, from: The Lever News
Hundreds of millions of dollars are potentially at stake in the fight over airline refunds.
https://www.levernews.com/airlines-want-to-keep-the-money-they-owe-you/
Today in SCV History (May 5)
date: 2024-05-05, from: SCV New (TV Station)
1828 – Soledad Canyon settler John Lang born in Herkimer County, N.Y. [story
https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-may-5/
Why is my ElasticSearch query so slow?
date: 2024-05-05, from: Matthew Lincoln Blog
The center of my working hours for the past two years has been constellate.org, a platform for teaching, learning, and performing text analysis with scholarly and primary source content from JSTOR, Portico, and elsewhere.
.](/assets/images-display/constellate-builder.png)
The Constellate dataset builder page.
Our dataset builder allows users to filter and explore a corpus of over 35 million documents. This search - and the analytical queries that power the data visualizations in this builder - rely on an ElasticSearch cluster on the backend. We rely heavily on ElasticSearch aggregations every time a user updates their filters, taking the resulting set of documents (no matter if it is 500 docs or 15 million) and count up the different document types, providers, genres, decades of publication, and more. These aggregations are memory-heavy actions, especially when aggregating over 10+ million documents. Even so, ElasticSearch was usually able to return results in under 3,000 milliseconds, providing an acceptable user experience.
Why have our queries gotten slower and slower?
But we started to see something concerning happening: over the past six months, we watched the worst-case query durations (those the 95th percentile execution time for all searches performed in a week) steadily growing, starting to crest over an unbearable 10 seconds long. At that point our default request timeouts on our backend services were truly breaking the end user experience.
](/assets/images-display/constellate-durations.png)
Median and 95th percentile durations (in milliseconds) of search queries on constellate.org
I hadn’t made any changes to the way we composed the queries we sent to ElasticSearch in that time. Our overall usage was increasing, yes, and during very large bulk ingests we did see some overall slowdowns in query processing as expected. But not at a pace that seemed liable to explain why these pathological query times were growing steadily worse. We had been steadily adding new documents to the index, some coming in large monthly batches, but we’d been doing that for years without seeing this kind of progressive slowdown.
So I started experimenting, running searches directly against our
cluster and one at a time, removing and adding back in the aggregations
to see if any oe was causing a particularly heavy load on the cluster.
The culprit: our aggregation of keyphrases, which were sets of
significant terms calculated for each document. For very large search
result sets that returned 20 or 30 million documents, the keyphrases
terms
aggregation was adding between 3 and 8 ruinous whole seconds onto the
query.
Why was this
terms
aggregation so slow, while the half-dozen others we were running were
fast as ever? Cardinality. While we only have a handful of different
providers, a few dozen subject categorizations, and maybe a hundred
different languages, there are over 50 million distinct
keyphrases in the system. With such high cardinality,
ElasticSearch had to generate an extremely large set of global ordinals
when being asked for a terms query, and then actually rank those
ordinals and return the top fifty most frequently occurring. Even
precalculating
global ordinals (the usual first step in addressing slow
terms
aggregations) was not enough to tame the IO needed to aggregate 30+
million documents’ intersection with 50+ million keyphrase values.
Why hadn’t this problem asserted itself before? Because for a few years, we had only extracted keyphrases from about 1/3 of our documents, and weren’t actively contributing new ones into the system. While better automating our ingest pipelines this year, we took the opportunity to regenerate a lot of our keyphrases, backfilling our database with an enormous number of new keyphrase values. While this problem of cardinality was in our system all along, the scale simply wasn’t large enough to make its impact felt until recently.
So make the problem smaller
Because we only want to get a relative ranking of the top keyphrases, a
straightforward way to reduce this problem is to use a
sampler
aggregation. By grabbing a sample of up to 5,000 documents before
running the
terms
aggregation, we easily brought the impact of the keyphrases aggregation
back under control. This effectively puts a ceiling on the number of
files whose keyphrases need to be looked up in an aggregation, and
mitigates the real scaling issues that we were starting to encounter
with our data.
https://matthewlincoln.net/2024/05/05/elasticsearch-slow-aggregations.html
Mammograms should now start at 40, US panel says
date: 2024-05-05, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/hold-for-wknd-mammograms-should-now-start-at-40-panel-says-/7596224.html
Texas veterinarian helps crack the mystery of bird flu in cows
date: 2024-05-05, from: VOA News USA
New US Army video aims to lure recruits for psychological operations
date: 2024-05-05, from: VOA News USA
FORT LIBERTY, North Carolina — The video is unsettling, with haunting images of faceless people, fire and soldiers. The voiceover is a cascade of recognizable historical voices as the screen pulses cryptic messages touting the power of words, ideas and “invisible hands.”
Hints of its origin are tucked into frames as they flash by: PSYWAR. The U.S. Army’s psychological warfare soldiers are using their brand of mental combat to bring in what the service needs: recruits. And if you find the video intriguing, you may be the Army’s target audience as it works to enlist soldiers to join its Special Operations Command.
Released early Thursday, the video is the second provocative recruiting ad that, in itself, exemplifies the kind of work the psyop soldiers do to influence public opinion and wage the war of words overseas. Called “Ghosts in the Machine 2,” it is coming out two years after the inaugural video was quietly posted on the unit’s YouTube site and generated a firestorm of online chatter.
“It’s a recruiting video,” said the Army major who created it, speaking with The Associated Press before the release. “Someone who watches it and thinks, wow, that was effective, how was it constructed — that’s the kind of creative mindset we’re looking for.”
The soldier, a member of the 8th Psychological Operations Group based at Fort Liberty, North Carolina, also made the first video. He asked that his name not be used to protect his identity, as is common among special forces troops.
Psyop units are used for an array of missions that can range from simple leaflet drops to more sophisticated propaganda and messaging aimed at deceiving the enemy or shaping opinion on foreign soil. It’s illegal for the U.S. military to conduct psychological operations on Americans.
Army Special Operations Command leaders and special forces recruiters hope that a new stream of chatter inspired by the video will help bring in recruits to an often unseen and little known job.
“From a tactical level, the psyop mission is extremely hard to show and tell,” said Lt. Col. Steve Crowe, commander of the Special Forces Recruiting Battalion. And it’s the job in Army special forces that recruiters say is the hardest to fill.
Across the military, the armed services have been struggling to meet enlistment goals, with most falling far short of their targets in recent years. The Army, which is the largest service, has had the most trouble, missing its goal by about 15,000 soldiers for the past two years. But most of the services say things are improving this year.
The Army’s Special Operations recruiters who recruit from already-serving soldiers say they are making about 75% of their overall goal, which is between 3,000 and 4,000. Of that, they have to bring in about 650 active-duty soldiers to psychological operations per year.
Officials blame the nation’s low unemployment, increased competition from corporate businesses, which can pay more and offer similar benefits, and a sluggish return from several years of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions that prevented recruiters from visiting schools and attending other public events.
Recruiting struggles in Army Special Operations Command have mirrored those of the larger Army. The recruiters said they are responsible for bringing in several types of special forces — the most well-known are the Green Berets and Delta Force, but there are also Civil Affairs, Psychological Operations and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known as the Night Stalkers.
The Army has said it intends to trim the number of psyop soldiers but still has struggled to fill the ranks.
Perhaps the most celebrated psyop was in World War II, when the so-called U.S. Ghost Army outwitted the Germans using inflatable tanks, radio trickery, costumes and impersonations. In what was dubbed Operation Viersen, the soldiers used the inflatables, sound trucks and phony headquarters to draw German units away from the point on the Rhine River where the 9th Army was actually crossing. Several of the last surviving members of the unit were recently awarded the Congressional Gold Medal at a ceremony in Washington.
These days, psyop activities are often classified. But one of the last U.S. service members to die in Afghanistan — killed by a suicide bomber at Abbey Gate during the chaotic evacuation in 2021 — was a psyop soldier: Army Staff Sgt. Ryan Knauss, 23, of Corryton, Tennessee. His task that day was largely crowd control and influence, by using a bullhorn to communicate with the frantic throngs of Afghans and get them moving in the right direction.
A more recent example would be assistance to Ukraine. U.S. psychological operations soldiers have advised and assisted Ukrainian troops in their efforts to counter Russian disinformation campaigns since 2014. After the Russian invasion in February 2022, Ukrainian forces used a range of tactics — including leaflets and social media — to entice Russian troops to surrender and tell them how and where to give themselves up.
About half of the psychological operations troops are young people who join when they enlist. The rest are recruited from within the Army’s existing ranks. The command’s recruiters focus on the internal audience, which has its own challenges.
A growing hurdle, according to Crowe and Army Maj. Jim Maicke, executive officer of the Special Forces recruiting battalion, is that these days regular soldiers across the Army have less interaction with special operations forces than they did during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
In those conflicts, soldiers often worked side-by-side with commandos, or were deployed at the same bases and had a better view of what they did.
“Business was generally pretty good. And the reason, we believe, was all the interaction that was happening between special operations and conventional forces,” said Crowe, adding that soldiers “got to see behind the curtain, how we operate. We don’t have that anymore.”
It’s particularly difficult for psyops soldiers, whose work is often less visible than that of the more celebrated Army commandos and not always understood.
“We’re all nerds for sure,” said the Army major who created the ad. “But we’re all nerds in different ways.” Usually, those who are drawn to the job are “planners,” he said. “They’re writers, they’re great thinkers. They’re idea people.”
Often, he said, they are creative, such as artists and illustrators, but others are tech experts who can bring those ideas to life in videos or online messaging.
The new “Ghosts in the Machine” video is aimed at that audience.
Recruiters say the first video was successful.
“I think what he does with ‘Ghosts in the Machine’ is it tells you what psychological operations is, and shows you it, without telling you in words,” said Crowe. “You watch the video and you’re like, OK, this is how I’ll influence and change behavior.”
On a recent recruiting trip to the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, the recruiters brought a psyop officer and a civil affairs officer along to speak with the cadets.
“We had a very limited amount of time to engage about 450 cadets,” said Maicke, a graduate of the college. “And the psyop officer chose to give a brief introduction and then immediately turn on the ‘Ghosts in the Machine’ video. He ended with, ‘if anyone has any questions about this, I’m right over here,’ and business was booming.”
In fact, about six months after the first video was released, the command began surveying soldiers who applied for the psyop mission and got into the assessment and selection course. More than 51% said the video had a medium to high level of influence on their decision to try out for the job, recruiters said.
That, said the Army major, is the goal of the second video, which ends with a crescendo of music, shots of marching military troops with their arms raised in surrender, and a question streaming across the screen: “Do you believe in the power of words and ideas. Will You. We Believe.” The final frames say PSYWAR and show the website: goarmysof.com.
US Air Force leader takes AI-controlled fighter jet ride in test vs human pilot
date: 2024-05-05, from: VOA News USA
EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. — With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of U.S. airpower. But the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence, not a human pilot. And riding in the front seat was Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall.
AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning for an AI-enabled fleet of more than 1,000 unmanned warplanes, the first of them operating by 2028.
It was fitting that the dogfight took place at Edwards Air Force Base, a vast desert facility where Chuck Yeager broke the speed of sound and the military has incubated its most secret aerospace advances. Inside classified simulators and buildings with layers of shielding against surveillance, a new test-pilot generation is training AI agents to fly in war. Kendall traveled here to see AI fly in real time and make a public statement of confidence in its future role in air combat.
“It’s a security risk not to have it. At this point, we have to have it,” Kendall said in an interview with The Associated Press after he landed. The AP and NBC were granted permission to witness the secret flight on the condition that it would not be reported until it was complete because of operational security concerns.
The AI-controlled F-16, called Vista, flew Kendall in lightning-fast maneuvers at more than 800 kph that put pressure on his body at five times the force of gravity. It went nearly nose to nose with a second human-piloted F-16 as both aircraft raced within 305 meters of each other, twisting and looping to try force their opponent into vulnerable positions.
At the end of the hour-long flight, Kendall said he’d seen enough to trust this still-learning AI to decide whether to launch weapons in war.
There’s a lot of opposition to that idea. Arms control experts and humanitarian groups are deeply concerned that AI one day might be able to autonomously drop bombs that kill people without further human consultation, and they are seeking greater restrictions on its use.
“There are widespread and serious concerns about ceding life-and-death decisions to sensors and software,” the International Committee of the Red Cross has warned. Autonomous weapons “are an immediate cause of concern and demand an urgent, international political response.”
Kendall said there will always be human oversight in the system when weapons are used.
The military’s shift to AI-enabled planes is driven by security, cost and strategic capability. If the U.S. and China should end up in conflict, for example, today’s Air Force fleet of expensive, manned fighters will be vulnerable because of gains on both sides in electronic warfare, space and air defense systems. China’s air force is on pace to outnumber the U.S. and it is also amassing a fleet of flying unmanned weapons.
Future war scenarios envision swarms of American unmanned aircraft providing an advance attack on enemy defenses to give the U.S. the ability to penetrate an airspace without high risk to pilot lives. But the shift is also driven by money. The Air Force is still hampered by production delays and cost overruns in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which will cost an estimated of $1.7 trillion.
Smaller and cheaper AI-controlled unmanned jets are the way ahead, Kendall said.
Vista’s military operators say no other country in the world has an AI jet like it, where the software first learns on millions of data points in a simulator, then tests its conclusions during actual flights. That real-world performance data is then put back into the simulator where the AI then processes it to learn more.
China has AI, but there’s no indication it has found a way to run tests outside a simulator. And, like a junior officer first learning tactics, some lessons can only be learned in the air, Vista’s test pilots said.
Vista flew its first AI-controlled dogfight in September 2023, and there have only been about two dozen similar flights since. But the programs are learning so quickly from each engagement that some AI versions being tested on Vista are beating human pilots in air-to-air combat.
The pilots at this base are aware that in some respects, they may be training their replacements or shaping a future construct where fewer of them are needed.
But they also say they would not want to be up in the sky against an adversary that has AI-controlled aircraft if the U.S. does not also have its own fleet.
“We have to keep running. And we have to run fast,” Kendall said.
May 4, 2024
date: 2024-05-05, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
I’ve worked my way out to the West Coast over the past several days, and in the process, stopped by this vernal pool in Michigan. Not my usual haunts, but it said “Spring” just as clearly as the peepers do in Maine. Headed to bed before an early wake up call tomorrow to head back to the other coast.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-4-2024
With PowerPC, Windows CE and the WiiN-PAD slate, everyone’s a WiiN-er (except Data General)
date: 2024-05-05, from: Old Vintage Computer Research
Telemedicine (and mobile health generally) accumulated a hunk of public mindshare during the pandemic emergency, but speaking as someone with a day job in public health for almost two decades, it’s always been a buzzword in certain corners of IT with enough money sloshing around that vendors repeatedly flirted with it. Microsoft, of course, is no exception, and on at least one occasion in the late 1990s pitched Windows CE at this space. After all, WinCE was oriented at low-power portable devices perfect for medicine on the go, and like perennial predictions of “the Linux desktop” finally taking off, Microsoft’s eager sales team was certain the day of the portable physician’s device had come as well.
And, well, no. I can’t think of a single product from that particular salvo that actually survived, let alone thrived. But we’ve got one of them here — and, as you might expect, there’s a few odd things about it. First off, it’s a slate. (We call them tablets now, kids.)
Not a vanishingly rare form factor for a Windows CE device, though hardly the most common. It’s also got a full-size dock, a camera and … a Data General badge? The Nova-AViiON-CLARiiON-Data General/One Data General that put two I’s into everything?
But that’s not the really wacky part. Check out the CPU it’s running.
What are we going to do with it? Well, what do you think we’re gonna do with it? We’re going to program it, so that we can finally have some software! And, of course, since this wacky thing was there at the bitter end, we’ll talk more about the last days of Data General and what happened next.
We last ran into Data General in the 1980s with the Data General/One, their (for 1984) ultraportable DOS laptop with a great form factor and terrible screen that we rehabilitated. Data General was founded in 1968 in Hudson, Massachusetts by three disaffected Digital Equipment Corporation employees, Edson de Castro, Henry Burkhardt III and Richard Sogge, along with Herbert Richmond from Fairchild Semiconductor. de Castro had been chief engineer of DEC’s 1965 12-bit PDP-8 minicomputer which by then was one of the company’s strongest sellers. The PDP-8 was a less expensive system than their bigger machines, but it was nevertheless costly to manufacture due to its use of discrete logic modules and wirewrap. To de Castro’s surprise and frustration, however, DEC management was uninterested in an even lower-cost PDP-8 concept produced with newer printed circuit board and wave soldering technologies. He was convinced he could do better.
And the 1969 Nova did, in fact, do better. It used a similarly simple accumulator-oriented instruction set like the PDP-8, but it was smaller, faster and cheaper to produce, and its 16-bit word size could even compete with DEC’s higher-end PDP-11. DEC’s unsuccessful lawsuit probably only legitimized the upstart and it had stratospheric growth into the mid-1970s — which came to a rapid halt with the 1974 Eclipse, DG’s intended successor to the Nova with virtual memory and a proper hardware stack. DG could not solve production problems with the Eclipse for several years, leading to a wave of legal action from customers when preorders didn’t arrive, and an effort to make a microcomputer Nova (the microNOVA) failed in 1977. Data General’s attempt to leapfrog into the 32-bit world was the subject of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Soul of a New Machine, detailing a skunkworks project codenamed Eagle that developed a backwards-compatible architecture, while another team hit the second-system effect wall with Fountainhead as a more direct technical assault on DEC VAX. Eagle became the extremely successful AOS-based MV systems in 1980, a stupendous reversal of fortune for the company that by 1984 had over US$1 billion in annual sales.
Still, the MV project was costly for Data General to develop, and many former customers had abandoned them. This led to smaller projects in the 1980s as minicomputer makers confronted their fates against the rise of the microcomputer. The Desktop Generation systems, using microECLIPSE and Intel CPUs to run MS-DOS or CP/M concurrently with DG/RDOS, were complex to use, expensive and unpopular, and only the Data General/One laptop, an upscale product in a segment with relatively few competitors, gained market traction. By 1988 Eagle and DG/One designer Tom West convinced de Castro that DG’s proprietary legacy systems had no long-term future against those from IBM (and, at the time, DEC), and that they should become more commodity-focused and Unix-based, since the market was going that way.
West’s prophecy was of course correct, though in ways the company couldn’t have predicted. The 1989 Unix-based AViiON (a name likely suggestive of “Nova II”) had the bad luck of selecting the Motorola 88000 as its CPU just two years before Motorola joined the AIM alliance and later cancelled it, and their second generation x86-based systems ended up hitting the market roughly at the same time as everyone else’s. Worse, their attempts to distinguish themselves with an innovative custom NUMA design turned out to perform suboptimally with Windows NT. What had more of a lasting effect was the 1994 CLARiiON RAID array, introduced as the HADA “High Availability Disk Array” for AViiON systems in 1992 before DG management realized it could have broader market appeal. Although splitting CLARiiON off as its own product made AViiON packages less attractive, CLARiiON arrays became a solid moneymaker in their own right as they were regarded as more reliable and higher-quality than other offerings.
A much lesser known part of Data General’s business were their portable data entry terminals, introduced around 1994 and sold variously as the DataGenies (I’d thought they’d call them DATAGENiiES but even DG’s marketdroids have some taste). These were AA-powered rugged handheld devices intended for use in the field, based around the 80C88 or a clone like the NEC V25 and capable of running custom applications. DataGenies were dockable with a PC to transmit information and usually fitted with a small LCD screen, keypad and barcode reader. The units were approved for hostile environments like oil rigs and boats and largely used for tracking and inventory management. It seems they were produced in some numbers as used examples even today are not hard to find.
Like most tech companies then and now, Data General had a small Healthcare Division to get a taste of the dough flowing through the moneyed halls of medicine, which existed in one form or another since at least 1987. Much of their work involved using Data General server kit to back partner frontends, such as a 1996 partnership that used AViiON hardware and CLARiiON disks as the backend for separately-developed PACS teleradiology workstations, but at least some of the Division’s operations sold customized DataGenies to hospitals and clinics where they were used for basic nursing tasks like vital signs and point-of-care testing. In 1998, Microsoft announced a new “strategic alliance” with DG for “integrated systems” using what Microsoft grandly termed “ActiveX for Healthcare.” In reality this was actually more of the same: independent vendors would use ActiveX (i.e., Microsoft COM) components in their client software, encouraged and supported by Microsoft and Data General’s network of “Healthcare Competency Centers,” which would connect to BackOffice installs on Windows NT running on AViiON. The first of the HCCs was scheduled to open in Boston nearby the DG offices in July.
DG’s relationship with Microsoft had an impact on their portables line as well. Expanding the line to introduce a full medically-oriented clinical handheld made sense to DG management, especially in a environment where “vertical mobile markets” had just popped up on the buzzword bingo card and were driving other small form factor devices. This time, however, no doubt with Microsoft’s strong urging, the product managers selected Windows CE as the base — not only to take advantage of the ecosystem but also almost certainly as a sales adjunct to AViiON hardware running Windows Terminal Services (now Remote Desktop Services) to which Windows CE thin clients could connect. The WiiN-PAD’s trademark application was filed September 29, 1998 and development occurred in the handheld division alongside Microsoft’s subsequent Windows CE healthcare announcement in October. Notably, the product they constructed seems to have been completely specific to DG and not a rebadge of anything else. Given that the device was completed around the spring of 1999, it’s likely the WiiN-PAD was the last new computer system Data General ever developed under its original name.
And here it is. Need your medications refilled? How’s that mucus going? Is this the first and last time I’ll use the word “mucus” in a classic computing blog? (Wanna bet?) The screen is nice and legible for 1999 (backlit 8” 640x480), the form factor is attractive, and the bright blue handle gives it charm. It’s hard to say exactly why or what physical cues tickled my brain, but even the mere appearance of it gives off very strong health care vibes. Indeed, my wife, who’s worked in several medical offices herself, asserted the very minute I unpacked it that it was a clinical unit.
There were supposedly two versions of the WiiN-PAD, the first being this basic slate, and then a larger unit called the WiiN-PAD MK with a 66-key splashproof cleanable membrane keyboard. I’ve never even seen pictures of the keyboard variant.
But it turns out you don’t need the MK’s keyboard anyway: you can dock it, and the dock has a PS/2 port to accept a full keyboard. The dock is a sturdy metal job with feet for the desk. You’ll still need a stylus for the screen (no mouse?), but when you’re at a desk you can use it mostly like any PC. Pogo pins in the base of the dock connect to the charging circuit in the slate and provide both power and keyboard data.
The dock must be powered to use any external keyboard. The hole in the back appears to be for putting in a spare battery; there are contacts in the base and it’s about the right size. More about the battery in a moment.
The WiiN-PAD has a single PCMCIA Type II slot, which in this unit is flaky and does not reliably recognize cards (or sometimes makes the machine freeze until the card is reinserted). I suspect this machine had a bit of a hard life and I blame the port. I was able to work around it for flash cards by worming a PC Card SD card adapter in and out until it got to the point where the card was recognized but the machine didn’t seize up. I could then pull the SD card out of the adapter instead of the entire PC Card and have it reliably operate. However, it was very hard to get other cards to work in it that way; after several attempts, I decided I was likely just to do more damage and I never did get any of the Ethernet cards working that worked with my other Windows CE 2 systems. There is no separate Compact Flash slot as is common in units of this era but it does have an interesting compensation for that, which I’ll show you when we get to the internals and demonstrate the machine in operation.
Much was made about the WiiN-PAD’s wireless capabilities, but they
were only ever options. If installed, it could support old-school 2.4GHz
802.11 (not 802.11b) with WEP reportedly using a Proxim chipset. Just to
see if it would work, I also tried a Proxim ORiiNOCO ORiNOCO Gold
PCMCIA card I pulled from one of my PowerBooks and allegedly supported
by this version of WinCE, and nothing happened, though that could be the
port as well. As a poor substitute, this device actually has an RJ-11
modular jack for a 56K software modem which was also optional. The modem
got some use, too, so stay tuned.
Strangely, the model number applique on this unit has been cut off, calling it the “Data General Model 53W.” This doesn’t match any DG SKU system I know of and is probably incomplete (although according to the dock sticker the WiiN-PAD’s official power supply is model SW173, so who knows). It’s possible it was a pre-release unit, but it seems to have all other production markings and a factory-generated UPC code and serial number.
The battery slots into a very secure set of tabs and divots covered by a door that’s lost its own tab and won’t stay on. The WiiN-PAD’s power pack is blue like the handle, manufactured by JBRO and resembles a regular lithium ion camcorder battery (7.2V, 1600mAh), but I can’t seem to find a replacement that fits. Fortunately it still holds some charge.
But as mentioned, it’s the chip it’s running that’s especially unique. Since we have the rear doors off and we have some idea how it all fits together, let’s crack it open and find the CPU, then talk a bit about the processor and WinCE’s brief, practically unremembered support for PowerPC.
The system is essentially a big plastic sandwich. The bottom of the unit has two fat screws that hold it together. When these screws are released, the case slots I’m holding together with my hand widen and the bottom rubber bumper can be removed. These are part of the unit’s fluid resistance, so be sure to reinstall the bumper’s tabs into those slots when reassembling.
The handle comes off with two exposed centre screws and then two sunken ones under appliques that you can pry out with a spudger. After you remove two more corner screws thus exposed, there are no other snaps holding the case together and you can just wedge it open.
The case is held together in part by the big black rubber bumpers around the screen, which are sticky and also act as a partial fluid seal. They are pressed into the mounts at back and hold with a friction fit. The LCD inverter is at the top with the pogo contacts, microphone, speaker and telephone jack on the bottom. We merely lift up the screen carefully with its bumpers and rotate it towards us, mindful that it’s connected in multiple places to the logic board.
The LCD is a Sanyo LM-DA53-21PTW, an 8” CSTN (not TFT) display, probably selected for cost reasons. This was apparently a relatively common part and NOS replacements don’t seem difficult to find.
With the screen pulled out, we can now see the backsides of two boards. The top one is the camera board and the bottom is the main logic board.
The camera board isn’t very complex, but I wasn’t sure how it was connected with its CCD and I didn’t disturb it. A single ribbon cable runs to the mainboard. Notice the 1998 copyright date.
Although a sticker on the DOC says “programmed” (“Win Pad”?), and at least part of the operating system appears to be on it, the DOC has a more visible purpose to the user and we’ll get to what it does a bit later. We also see a KM416S8030T-GL 16MB (2MB x 16-bit x 4-bank) DRAM chip, an STLC7550 analogue front-end interface for the softmodem, a MAXIM MAX148 which is probably used for the pen digitizer, and a MAXIM MAX745EAP which controls the battery charger. The RAM and the modem chip are clustered around what is obviously the backend of a large ball-grid array, and that has to be our CPU.
Rather than try to dig out the board and turn it over, the other alternative is to remove the PCMCIA card cage which is sitting on top of it (this has a 1999 copyright date, which is interesting). The card cage is held in by four tiny bolts with four tiny nuts sitting on four tiny plastic standoffs, but the alternative was possibly snapping wires from their solder points trying to free the board up inside the case, so the cage option seemed less dangerous (and I could try reseating the cage to see if that helped the card slot any — spoiler alert, it didn’t). We carefully unscrew those nuts, cuss like a sailor when they fall into the casing anyway, cuss some more when the standoffs do the same thing, and then wedge the cage off its connector with a nylon spudger.
The MPC821 was part of Motorola’s first set of embedded PowerPC CPUs. The PowerPC embedded line started with IBM’s 1994 PowerPC 403, nearly contemporary with the mainstream 601/603/604, which had no FPU and only later an optional MMU (both standard on the 6xx), running from 20 to 80MHz. These were ultra-low-end chips meant for limited duty in things like set-top boxes and personal electronics. The 4xx series is still manufactured today, primarily by AMCC, though IBM also offers synthesizeable versions and a PowerPC 405 is embedded in every modern POWER9 CPU (including the one I’m typing on) as the on-chip controller.
The original Windows CE 1.0 in 1996 supported Hitachi SuperH (SH-3/SH7708), MIPS R3000 (Philips PR31500, derived from the Toshiba R3900) and MIPS R4000 (NEC VR4101) cores, though most of the devices sold were SH-3 due to its higher performance. 1.0’s release was bumpy for a variety of reasons and the devices’ form factor proved controversial with reviewers. Motorola’s market failure with its own personal devices line, notably the Magic Cap Envoy but also the Newton-based Marco (both trademarks Motorola confusingly resurrected for unrelated products later), caused them to lobby hard to port CE 1.0 to the 821/823/860 and recoup their investment, though it was never released.
Nevertheless, Microsoft hadn’t forgotten. For CE 2.0 in 1997, Microsoft made the operating system more modular and substantially broadened the architectures it supported, recognizing the plethora of embedded CPU options that were flourishing then. In addition to SuperH (SH-3 but now also SH-4), MIPS R3000 (Philips PR31500 but also Toshiba TX3912, both using the same core, and the NEC VR3900) and R4000 (NEC VR4101, but also VR4102 and VR4300), Microsoft added x86 support (486DX, Pentium and AMD Élan SC400), ARM (720T and DEC StrongARM SA-1100) and finally the PowerPC. For reasons unclear the 860 was excluded, though the core would probably have worked; instead, it was intended for the MPC821 and MPC823 as well as the 33MHz IBM 403GC, the first of the 403 variants to have an MMU.
Motorola produced evaluation boards for the 821 and 860 (the MBX821 and MBX860 respectively) that vendors variously used as reference designs. These boards could run Windows CE and Linux, Wind River Systems supported VxWorks on it (which the Kodak devices used), and there was even a partial port of (of course) NetBSD. Other than that, however, both the 8xx and 403GC failed to achieve a design win with any major Windows CE vendor, most likely due to the other better supported options, and for years it was widely believed there were no production PowerPC WinCE devices ever sold to consumers — the only other mention I’ve seen was some sort of modular controller for a security system, though it doesn’t look like that was released. Its presence on this board must have been a surprise; Pen Computing, which is one of the few publications to even mention the WiiN-PAD, didn’t have any idea what its CPU was at the time. (It also gives its specs as “16-64MB” of RAM and “24-72MB” of flash, but this one has 32MB and 24MB respectively, and I don’t know if there were other configurations.) It’s conceiveably possible that DG’s old contacts at Motorola after the AViiON 88K debacle cut them a deal on 821 boards to make up for it, but regardless of how it came to be, here we are.
Before we tour the system, it would be nicer to take some proper screen grabs, maybe even run a benchmark. Unfortunately, though hardly surprisingly, there’s almost no software available for PowerPC Windows CE. I only found one package even offering a PowerPC option, but it turned out to require CE 3.0, and that particular software package won’t help us anyway since we have no network right now.
So let’s build some basic apps of our own! I figured you never send a PC to do a PowerPC’s job, and it only seemed right to build the WiiN-PAD’s apps on my MDD G4 Power Mac running Windows 2000 under Virtual PC in Mac OS 9.2.2. For this task I chose Windows CE Platform Builder 2.11 because that was the easiest one for me to get my hands on and it should generate compatible binaries with Windows CE 2.12.
Installing Platform Builder.
Don’t typos on splash screens give you confidence, too? I’m sure it’s not a reflection on the code quality!
From the Platform Builder IDE, we’ll create a test application as a proof of concept with one architecture, PowerPC.
This will be a very simple application that just pops up a “hello world” message box and quits. This is the entirety of the source code I personally wrote; the rest was default boilerplate provided by the template. It compiled, so we’ll grab the .exe and stick it on the WiiN-PAD’s SD card.
It’s worth looking at this file in detail since there aren’t very many PowerPC CE binaries around, and this one is small enough to analyze thoroughly. Notably, the executable is little-endian. No production 32-bit PowerPC was ever truly little endian and they instead implemented a per-page mode that only applies to how memory is accessed, analogous functionally to the way 68K Alpha Micro systems run little-endian by swapping bus lines. (The absence of this mode in the G5 was why Virtual PC, which depends on this behaviour, didn’t work on the PowerPC 970 until it was rewritten.) Windows NT, which ran on the mainline PowerPC 603 and 604 officially from NT 3.51 through 4.0, also runs the CPU in this mode.
Nothing understands these binaries anymore, but we can still disassemble them by building a trivial Portable Executable parser, extracting the opcodes, and feeding them into something else to disassemble. It’s worth noting that modern Power ISA chips starting with the POWER8 do have a true little-endian mode, including the Raptor Talos II POWER9 I’m typing this on, so we can keep the byte order the same, turn this into a phony ELF binary, and have gdb act as the disassembler.
=> 0x00000000100101fc: stw r31,-4(r1) 0x0000000010010200: mflr r31 0x0000000010010204: stwu r1,-48(r1) 0x0000000010010208: stw r3,56(r1) 0x000000001001020c: stw r4,60(r1) 0x0000000010010210: stw r5,64(r1) 0x0000000010010214: stw r6,68(r1) 0x0000000010010218: li r6,0 0x000000001001021c: lis r11,1 0x0000000010010220: addi r5,r11,12360 0x0000000010010224: lis r10,1 0x0000000010010228: addi r4,r10,12384 0x000000001001022c: li r3,0 0x0000000010010230: bl _entry+72 0x0000000010010234: addi r1,r1,48 0x0000000010010238: mtlr r31 0x000000001001023c: lwz r31,-4(r1) 0x0000000010010240: blr
If you’re new to this instruction set, PowerPC has 32 general purpose registers numbered r0 through r31. r0 has unusual limitations on its use, where it sometimes acts like a zero register (a la MIPS) and sometimes like an actual register, inspiring my favourite joke instruction mscdfr (“means something completely different for r0”). As a result, most compilers only use it for specific operations like getting values to and from special purpose registers and so forth. In the incomparable Raymond Chen’s multipart treatise on the PowerPC and Windows, he mentions that the only thing the Microsoft compiler used r0 for was stashing the link register with the return address. Here, however, it doesn’t seem to be used for anything at all: everything uses higher registers, despite the fact they’ll need to be saved into the stack frame because they’re non-volatile. r0 never appears in the disassembly anywhere.
Another interesting thing about this binary is that the portion of the function prologues that load and save those registers is actually separate from the main block of code and come at the end, at least in this unoptimized build. Those segments are called as subroutines, and the individual function prologues jump into them at the right point to load or save only the registers that need to be saved:
0x00000000100104a4: .long 0x0 0x00000000100104a8: .long 0x2 0x00000000100104ac: lwz r14,-72(r1) 0x00000000100104b0: lwz r15,-68(r1) 0x00000000100104b4: lwz r16,-64(r1) 0x00000000100104b8: lwz r17,-60(r1) 0x00000000100104bc: lwz r18,-56(r1) 0x00000000100104c0: lwz r19,-52(r1) 0x00000000100104c4: lwz r20,-48(r1) 0x00000000100104c8: lwz r21,-44(r1) 0x00000000100104cc: lwz r22,-40(r1) 0x00000000100104d0: lwz r23,-36(r1) 0x00000000100104d4: lwz r24,-32(r1) 0x00000000100104d8: lwz r25,-28(r1) 0x00000000100104dc: lwz r26,-24(r1) 0x00000000100104e0: lwz r27,-20(r1) 0x00000000100104e4: lwz r28,-16(r1) 0x00000000100104e8: lwz r29,-12(r1) 0x00000000100104ec: lwz r30,-8(r1) 0x00000000100104f0: lwz r31,-4(r1) 0x00000000100104f4: blr 0x00000000100104f8: .long 0x0 0x00000000100104fc: .long 0x0 0x0000000010010500: .long 0x1 0x0000000010010504: stw r14,-72(r1) 0x0000000010010508: stw r15,-68(r1) 0x000000001001050c: stw r16,-64(r1) 0x0000000010010510: stw r17,-60(r1) 0x0000000010010514: stw r18,-56(r1) 0x0000000010010518: stw r19,-52(r1) 0x000000001001051c: stw r20,-48(r1) 0x0000000010010520: stw r21,-44(r1) 0x0000000010010524: stw r22,-40(r1) 0x0000000010010528: stw r23,-36(r1) 0x000000001001052c: stw r24,-32(r1) 0x0000000010010530: stw r25,-28(r1) 0x0000000010010534: stw r26,-24(r1) 0x0000000010010538: stw r27,-20(r1) 0x000000001001053c: stw r28,-16(r1) 0x0000000010010540: stw r29,-12(r1) 0x0000000010010544: stw r30,-8(r1) 0x0000000010010548: stw r31,-4(r1) 0x000000001001054c: blr
Now, if we’re going to take a tour of this machine, we’d like to take screenshots like we did for our MIPS R4000-based “MIPS ThinkPad” IBM WorkPad z50. Fortunately there’s an open-source Windows CE screenshot program, Eiichiro Ito’s CaptCE, for which he released the source code under the MIT license (arigatō gozaimasu!). We’ll try to build that next.
Unfortunately, this build wasn’t quite so easy. It looks like this code, which was written originally for older versions of Windows CE, adds definitions for obtaining the system palette which now conflict with the operating system’s.
We comment that out …
This tool sits in the system tray and takes a numbered screenshot every time you click or tap on it. We’ll use these shots for the rest of our entry.
Before we do anything else, we need to fix the clock. On machines where the battery has died, sometimes the residual time can reflect when it was last used; if that’s so for this device, it can’t be later than April 8, 2003. This machine came from the Atlanta, Georgia area based on evidence I’ll demonstrate (and not just based on the seller), and certain identifiers left on it trace it back to Patient Care Technologies, a home-care, hospice and telehealth software provider. It’s not clear if this machine was actually in the field or only used internally for testing. PtCT was bought by Meditech in 2007.
And here we are at the Windows CE desktop. Compared to other contemporary WinCE systems like my WorkPad z50 and HP Jornada 690, the desktop is rather spare, demonstrating only Microsoft Pocket Word, Inbox (E-mail) and Internet Explorer. The Power Off shortcut is because the Suspend option from the Start button doesn’t do anything, and this fault I do blame on Data General. To resume from sleep, you press one of the rear buttons. There are some additional applications in the Start menu, however, and I’ll demonstrate those to you in good time.
Under My Computer we see a standard list of folders and devices you’d
expect from a WinCE 2.x system, but our DiskOnChip volume is
also exposed here. That’s the compensation for not having a
separate flash memory slot: the flash is built-in. Still, its presence
doesn’t seem nearly as convenient or useful as removable media would be,
and it was probably another deliberate choice to reduce cost and
eliminate another slot that could cost money get gunk in it.
It contains only one folder.
That folder is actually where Pocket Word and Inbox live, not with the rest of the ROM applications. It’s not clear why they did this and it takes space away from what you could store here yourself. There’s no Pocket Excel or Pocket PowerPoint like the WorkPad z50 had.
The main ROM applications are under as usual.
That includes the first of the WiiN-PAD specific applications, this one that calls it a “Wiin-PAD” (note capitalization difference). It reports OS version 2.12, the PowerPC 821 CPU (but no clock speed), and an operating system build date of September 16, 1999.
When the WiiN-PAD is walking around, its primary data entry method is via Jot, a screen-based system by Communications Intelligence Corporation and seen on other CE devices. Jot is the arrow in the system tray which you can tap to change modes, but the most straightforward way is this on-screen keyboard app accessible from the Start menu that you tap with the stylus. Most characters can be entered with it, including special keyboard options for diacritics.
The other method is by writing on the display directly, like Palm Graffiti. Jot does not use Graffiti strokes, probably to avoid an infringement lawsuit, and this machine is not particularly fast at processing letter forms. This entry area provided by the Jot app is horizontal.
However, it can also be vertical …
… and, as its last mode, if you tap on that arrow it will put a couple markers on the screen and allow you to write letters on the entire display. This actually worked out the best for me, especially because it prevents you from accidentally tapping anything else until you turn it off. Still, docking it with the keyboard is of course the most effective way of typing.
I’m not going to go into great detail on Inbox and Pocket Word except to say they are present and appear to work. Pocket Word also did duty for me as a simple plain-text editor, which is slightly overkill, but we work with what we have. It defaults to “Pocket Word” (.pwd) format, but is also capable of reading and writing .rtf, .txt and .doc (Word 97). However, if you try to sync your desktop documents to it, the synchronization process has certain features it doesn’t support: although most but not all text formatting is compatible, some effects like shadows are suppressed (though retained) in Pocket Word, tables don’t always come through intact, and headers, footers, footnotes, columns and style sheets are all stripped.
The Internet Explorer option is the “IESample” minibrowser rather than the full one I enjoyed on the WorkPad and the Jornada. I mentioned it has dialup networking, and here’s where it activates — at least, it will, once you figure out that this otherwise empty dialogue box is asking whether you want to dial in or not.
Remember MindSpring? MindSpring was a major ISP in its hometown of Atlanta, and it got even bigger in 2000 when it merged with EarthLink to become second only to AOL. I’ve censored the dial-in number and the login credentials.
404 area code not found
And, well, that’s about all we can do with it without a network connection. It’s useful for viewing Windows BMP files, though.
This version seems to lack SSL (or, for that matter, PCT). The Internet Options dialogue is correspondingly very simple. Yes, they used Yahoo! for their home page; this was the late 1990s, after all.
Let’s now have a look at some of the other built-in apps. The first one is this DiskOnChip informational display, showing we have … 90% of 16.59 MB free? Where did our 24MB go? The 7.41MB we don’t see here is actually used to store the majority of the operating system (Word and Inbox in the user portion notwithstanding).
The power applet shows the battery status and power saving options. I was able to get the battery up to a full 100%, though you can never tell with a battery this old. Still, it was enough to walk around with it and use it.
I mentioned there was a microphone and front speaker. The speaker is decent enough, but the microphone is terrible, and me speaking it into it was largely unintelligible on playback unless I yelled into it.
There are also two barcode applications. The first is a “demo” one that has you point at it and press and release the rear buttons to read a code. It will then type it out onscreen.
But a more interesting one is this scanner with multiple available modes, even QR codes.
It works mostly the same way: hold down one of the rear buttons and line up the barcode in the circled area as centred as possible.
The reader will then emit the code when recognized. Here I provided it with a jar of Vegemite and, as any Australian schoolchild will tell you, the UPC code for it is indeed 9355 2806. However, it refused to scan a can of Pibb Xtra, possibly because its barcode is reflective.
Or, you can simply use the camera as, you know, a camera.
It’s pretty poor dynamic range, especially in low light, and it’s not very detailed or sharp. But it works better than you’d think considering imaging isn’t the sensor’s primary purpose.
In the Control Panel are mostly the standard applets, with a few notable settings and a couple more bugs, like the Jot settings applet not doing anything other than opening invisible windows you can’t interact with.
This device is simply called “WiinPad-1093” [sic], which is its serial number (01093).
Naturally it supports sync, but there doesn’t appear to be any IrDA support.
Similarly, while there are NE2000 and Proxim Ethernet drivers, there is no wireless driver available.
None of this tells us how fast the CPU actually is, nor was I able to easily see an obvious oscillator on the portions of the board I exposed. Some operations seem slower than you’d expect from a 50MHz CPU, especially with Motorola’s data sheet touting it as “a high-performance embedded PowerPC core.” Their data sheet even quotes Dhrystone 2.1 benchmarks, alleging 66 VAX-MIPS at 50MHz. Let’s check that.
Since I’m converting the venerable Reinhold Weicker version, which was intended for command line use, we’ll make it run from the Windows CE command prompt.
Microsoft’s C/C++ compiler seemed brain-damaged here (in particular the preprocessor) and wouldn’t ignore parts of the timers file not meant for Win32 even with the correct defines set. I ended up moving that snippet over to the main code, as well as creating a stub WinMain() that just calls into the main Dhrystone program. As my systems here are MIPS R4K, SH-3 and PowerPC, I built optimized versions for all three. The register option was selected.
I ran the benchmarks on my “known” systems first just to make sure I was getting sane results. Pen Computing had benchmarks for Jupiter-class CE systems including the WorkPad z50 here, a 133MHz NEC VR4121 (MIPS R4000). They reported a VAX-MIPS of 72.36; we got 78.830 on 1.5 million runs. At about 9% variance, that puts us in the ballpark.
Our next datapoint is my HP Jornada 690, a 133MHz Hitachi SH7709A (SH-3). Pen Computing doesn’t report a VAX-MIPS in that table for the J680, its close sibling with the same CPU, but we can extrapolate an expected score of 88.87 from the 66.82 showing of the LG Phenom Express with a lower-clocked 100MHz SH7709A. Here we get 90.528 VAX-MIPS on 2 million runs, a variance of just 2%.
A better theory, however, is that it’s simply not running at 50MHz. The 821 also comes in a 25MHz part, XPC821ZP25, and if it were downclocked to 25MHz (33 VAX-MIPS) instead of 50MHz then that would be not too far off our observed value (18%). Data General might just have been using a 50MHz part here because that’s what they could get and ran it slow for power savings. Alternatively, if we do a straight scale we get a rate of 21.19MHz, which seems a little slow but not ridiculously so, or it could be a combination of any of these factors. If I find a second one, it would be interesting to see what it’s running as well — though I don’t think I’ll run into another one of these anytime soon.
Overall, the WiiN-PAD appears well adapted to its purpose and one with a wireless option would likely have made a very compelling clinical device. The PS/2 docking feature is great, the case is well-designed and the dock and hardware are robust. But it’s slow, it’s got obvious (though not crippling) bugs, and even its built-in software suite is meager — to say nothing of the fact that the only other software it can run are the programs I wrote specifically for it. I’ll not ding it for the PCMCIA issues, which are likely due to rough treatment, but everything else are black eyes. Still, I like it. It’s cute and looks good on a desk, it can do some useful work, and it’s very unlike many other CE devices out there. I get more wear out of my WorkPad today, but I certainly could have seen myself using this in 1999.
At any rate, let’s finish our story. The WiiN-PAD had existed for just a handful of months before storage specialist EMC announced it was buying Data General in August 1999 for US$1.1 billion (in 2024 dollars over $2.05 billion). The price surprised industry observers somewhat, but not the buyout itself: EMC was not only eliminating a competitor in storage systems, they were also acquiring a mid-market storage product in CLARiiON that their existing high-end Symmetrix line didn’t serve.
EMC was only interested in Data General’s storage systems, but the terms of the buyout required them to maintain the AViiON line and not sell it for at least two years. No such condition applied to any other division of Data General, however, and EMC management swiftly shut down the handheld line (and other units as well); the September 16, 1999 build date for this unit’s ROM may well be the last update it got before it was discontinued. Although there appears to have been some support for PowerPC at least in initial releases of Windows CE 3.0, assuming that single executable isn’t otherwise defective, Microsoft had already eliminated PowerPC support for Windows 2000 and it definitely wasn’t present in CE 4.0 or later. (Interestingly, the PowerPC-based Xbox 360 console used big-endian executables on a highly modified Windows 2000 kernel, the last gasp to date of Microsoft’s support for the architecture.)
As for the WiiN-PAD, I could find no record of new computer hardware developed subsequently under the original Data General name nor any company that produced any more of them, and it appears to truly have been Data General’s last official computer system. The WiiN-PAD’s IP, like most other components of the former Data General, is now part of Dell after it bought EMC in 2016. Data General’s original dg.com domain was subsequently snapped up by discount store chain Dollar General, and the modern Data General trademark today is owned by unrelated Spanish networking corporation Landatel who purchased it in 2023.
https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2024/05/with-powerpc-windows-ce-and-wiin-pad.html
Holy Hell, Ramadan, Easter, and Passover
date: 2024-05-05, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Dragging God into the Middle East.
The post Holy Hell, Ramadan, Easter, and Passover appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/05/04/holy-hell-ramadan-easter-and-passover/
Student protests mostly muted; some arrests on Virginia campus
date: 2024-05-05, from: VOA News USA
Musk Again Claims Tesla Will ‘Soon’ Have Banish, Actual Smart Summon
date: 2024-05-05, from: Inside EVs News
As Musk doubles down on AI and autonomy, he says Tesla Vision will ‘soon’ come for your ASS. Yes, really.
https://insideevs.com/news/718488/elon-musk-actually-smart-summon/
US man who copiloted first nonstop flight around world dies at 85
date: 2024-05-05, from: VOA News USA
MEREDITH, New Hampshire — Burt Rutan was alarmed to see the plane he had designed was so loaded with fuel that the wing tips started dragging along the ground as it taxied down the runway. He grabbed the radio to warn the pilot, his older brother Dick Rutan. But Dick never heard the message.
Nine days and three minutes later, Dick, along with copilot Jeana Yeager, completed one of the greatest milestones in aviation history: the first round-the-world flight with no stops or refueling.
A decorated Vietnam War pilot, Dick Rutan died Friday evening at a hospital in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, with Burt and other loved ones by his side. He was 85. His friend Bill Whittle said he died of a severe lung infection.
“He played an airplane like someone plays a grand piano,” said Burt Rutan of his brother, who was often described as having a velvet arm because of his smooth flying style.
A design, a dream
Burt Rutan said he had always loved designing airplanes and became fascinated with the idea of a craft that could go clear around the world. His brother was equally passionate about flying. The project took six years.
There was plenty to worry Burt during testing of the light graphite plane, Voyager. There were mechanical failures, any one of which would have been disastrous over a distant ocean. When fully laden, the plane couldn’t handle turbulence. And then there was the question of how the pilots could endure such a long flight on so little sleep. But Burt said his brother had an optimism about him that made them all believe.
“Dick never doubted whether my design would actually make it around, with still some gas in the tank,” Burt Rutan said.
Voyager left from Edwards Air Force Base in California just after 8 a.m. on Dec. 14, 1986. Rutan said with all that fuel, the wings had only inches of clearance. Dick couldn’t see when they started dragging on the runway. But when Burt called on the radio, copilot Yeager gave a speed report, drowning the message.
“And then, the velvet arm really came in,” Burt Rutan said. “And he very slowly brought the stick back and the wings bent way up, some 30 feet at the wingtips, and it lifted off very smoothly.”
They arrived back to a hero’s welcome as thousands gathered to witness the landing. Both Rutan brothers and Yeager were awarded a Presidential Citizenship Medal by President Ronald Reagan, who described how a local official in Thailand at first “refused to believe some cockamamie story” about a plane flying around the world on a single tank of gas.
“We had the freedom to pursue a dream, and that’s important,” Dick Rutan said at the ceremony.
A vet of combat missions
Richard Glenn Rutan was born in Loma Linda, California. He joined the U.S. Air Force as a teenager and flew more than 300 combat missions during the Vietnam War.
He was part of an elite group that would loiter over enemy anti-aircraft positions for hours at a time. The missions had the call sign “Misty” and Dick was known as “Misty Four-Zero.” Among the many awards Dick received were the Silver Star and the Purple Heart.
He survived having to eject twice from planes, once when his F-100 Super Sabre was hit by enemy fire over Vietnam, and a second time when he was stationed in England and the same type of plane had a mechanical failure. He retired from the Air Force with the rank of lieutenant colonel and went on to work as a test pilot.
Dick Rutan set another record in 2005 when he flew about 10 miles (16 kilometers) in a rocket-powered plane launched from the ground in Mojave, California. It was also the first time U.S. mail had been carried by a such a plane.
Still Very Lucky
date: 2024-05-05, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Santa Barbara is still very lucky: We have the Santa Barbara Independent, which continues to defy the odds and retain its place as our “paper of record.”
The post Still Very Lucky appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/05/04/still-very-lucky/
AI scams could become ‘growth industry of all time,’ warns Buffett
date: 2024-05-05, from: VOA News USA
omaha, nebraska — Warren Buffett cautioned the tens of thousands of shareholders who packed an arena for his annual meeting that artificial intelligence scams could become “the growth industry of all time.”
Doubling down on his cautionary words from last year, Buffett told the throngs he recently came face to face with the downside of AI. Someone made a fake video of Buffett, apparently convincing enough that Buffett himself said he could imagine it tricking him into sending money overseas.
The billionaire investing guru predicted scammers will seize on the technology and may do more harm with it than good.
“It has enormous potential for good and enormous potential for harm and I just don’t know how that plays out,” he said.
Earnings
The day started early Saturday with Berkshire Hathaway announcing a steep drop in earnings as the paper value of its investments plummeted and it pared its Apple holdings. The company reported a $12.7 billion profit, or $8.825 per Class A share, in first the quarter, down 64% from $35.5 billion, or $24,377 per A share a year ago.
But Buffett encourages investors to pay more attention to the conglomerate’s operating earnings from the companies it owns. Those jumped 39% to $11.222 billion, or $7,796.47 per Class A share, led by insurance companies’ performance.
None of that got in the way of the fun.
Throngs flooded the arena to buy up Squishmallow plush toys of Buffett and former Vice Chairman Charlie Munger, who died last fall. The event attracts investors from around the world and is unlike any other company meeting.
“This is one of the best events in the world to learn about investing. To learn from the gods of the industry,” said Akshay Bhansali, who spent the better part of two days traveling from India to Omaha.
A notable absence
Devotees come for tidbits of wisdom from Buffett, who famously dubbed the meeting Woodstock for Capitalists.
This was the first meeting since Munger died.
The meeting opened with a video tribute highlighting some of his best-known quotes, including classics like “If people weren’t so often wrong, we wouldn’t be so rich.” The video also featured skits the investors made with Hollywood stars over the years, including a “Desperate Housewives” spoof where one of the women introduced Munger as her boyfriend and another in which actress Jaimie Lee Curtis swooned over him.
As the video ended, the arena erupted in a prolonged standing ovation honoring Munger, whom Buffett called “the architect of Berkshire Hathaway.”
Buffett said Munger remained curious about the world up until the end of his life at 99, hosting dinner parties, meeting with people and holding regular Zoom calls.
For decades, Munger and Buffett functioned as a classic comedy duo, with Buffett offering lengthy setups to Munger’s witty one-liners.
Together, the pair transformed Berkshire from a floundering textile mill into a massive conglomerate made up of a variety of interests, from insurance companies such as Geico to BNSF railroad to several major utilities and an assortment of other companies.
Next Gen leaders
Munger’s absence, however, created space for shareholders to get to know better the two executives who directly oversee Berkshire’s companies: Ajit Jain, who manages the insurance units; and Abel, who handles everything else and has been named Buffett’s successor. The two shared the main stage with Buffett this year.
The first time Buffett kicked a question to Greg Abel, he mistakenly said “Charlie?” Abel shrugged off the mistake and dove into the challenges utilities face from the increased risk of wildfires and some regulators’ reluctance to let them collect a reasonable profit.
Morningstar analyst Greggory Warren said he believes Abel spoke up more Saturday and let shareholders see some of the brilliance Berkshire executives talk about.
A look to the future
Buffett has made clear that Abel will be Berkshire’s next CEO, but said Saturday that he had changed his opinion on how the company’s investment portfolio should be handled. He had previously said it would fall to two investment managers who handle small chunks of the portfolio now. On Saturday, Buffett endorsed Abel for the gig, as well as overseeing the operating businesses and any acquisitions.
“He understands businesses extremely well, and if you understand businesses, you understand common stocks,” Buffett said. Ultimately, it will be up to the board to decide, but the billionaire said he might come back and haunt them if they try to do it differently.
Nevertheless, the best applause line of the day was Buffett’s closing remark: “I not only hope that you come next year but I hope that I come next year.”
Using DuckDB to seamlessly query a large parquet file over HTTP
date: 2024-05-05, from: Marginallia log
A neat property of the parquet file format is that it’s designed with block I/O in mind, so that when you are interested in only parts of the contents of a file, it’s possible to some extent to only read that data. Many tools are aware of this property, and DuckDB is one of them. Depending on which circles you run in, a lesser known aspect of HTTP is range requests, where you specify which bytes in a file to be retrieved.
https://www.marginalia.nu/log/a_105_duckdb_parquet/
Creating a halftone effect with CSS
date: 2024-05-05, from: Lean Rada’s blog
For RSS readers: This article contains interactive content available on the original post on leanrada.com.
Here’s a quick halftone effect (i.e. a retro printed look) using CSS with only one div at the minimum.
First of all, here’s a live demo:
Interactive content: Visit the website to play with interactive content! Alternative text: CSS halftone demo
Toggle the filter class using the checkbox above.
To further illustrate the halftone effect, the following demo can vary the size of the dots and the degree to which they ‘bleed’:
Interactive content: Visit the website to play with interactive content! Alternative text: CSS halftone demo
There are several ways to do this in CSS. The above is a bit more advanced with 2-3 extra divs. I’ll try to show a simple method, first.
Halftone basics
To keep it simple, let’s start with a black-and-white image. It should be easy to layer in additional colors with the same principle.
Interactive content: Visit the website to play with interactive content! Alternative text: CSS halftone demo
Actually, let’s start with a simpler image. A gradient, to illustrate how halftone works in the first place.
Interactive content: Visit the website to play with interactive content! Alternative text: CSS halftone demo
A halftone pattern is an array of ink dots simulating the appearance of smooth gradiation of tones using just two pure tones (pure black ‘ink’ and pure white background in this case). By varying the size of the dots, the average ink coverage in a given area determines how light or dark the tone is in that area.
Dots large enough would bleed into each other, creating the effect of negative dots.
Screen and threshold
Dot size and bleed can be emulated in one go using two simple image processing operations, screen and threshold.
The first step is to screen the source image (in this case, the gradient) with a blurry dot matrix pattern.
Screen is an operation that mixes the pixels of the source image and the overlay image using some kind of an inverted multiplication formula. Essentially, it lightens lighter areas multiplicatively.
Because the dots are blurry (i.e. having feathered edges), the screen operation gives us smaller-looking dots in lighter areas on the original image and denser dots in darker areas.
This operation is done via CSS mix-blend-mode: screen.
The blurry dot pattern is generated using a radial-gradient
as a repeated background-image, like this:
background-image: radial-gradient(14px at 50% 50%, black, white);
background-size: 20px 20px;The next step is to threshold the resulting image. That is, convert the image into pure black & pure white pixels. Dark pixels become fully black, and light pixels become white — according to some defined threshold between light vs dark.
This creates the signature black-ink-matrix-on-white-paper look.
In CSS, there is no threshold filter, but it can be simulated by
applying an extremely high contrast filter, pushing
pixel values to the extremes of pure white and pure black. Effectively
the same result as thresholding. In code, that’s simply a filter:
contrast(999).
Another thing we can add is a blur filter, just before the thresholding operation. This emulates surface tension of the ink, or something.
Let’s take a moment to look at the basic black-and-white solution so far:
<div class="halftone">
<img src=...>
</div>
<style>
.halftone {
position: relative;
/* brightness controls the threshold point */
filter: brightness(0.8) blur(3px) contrast(999);
}
.halftone::after {
position: absolute;
inset: 0;
background: radial-gradient(10px at center, black, white);
background-size: 20px 20px;
mix-blend-mode: screen;
}
</style>Colours may yeet knowingly
When you get the black ink dots going, adding the rest of the colours is easy. Just add a set of dots for each of CMY — cyan, magenta, and yellow, the “primary colours” of ink — to complete the CMYK! Make sure to stagger the dots so they are distributed evenly. How to stagger them well is left as an exercise to the dear reader, you (see halftone angles, moiré patterns, etc).
background:
radial-gradient(10px at center, #000, white),
radial-gradient(10px at ..., #0ff, white),
radial-gradient(10px at ..., #f0f, white),
radial-gradient(10px at ..., #ff0, white);
These additional layers will work just as well as black because the
contrast filter operates on each RGB channel independently.
The colours of cyan (#0ff), magenta (#f0f),
and yellow (#ff0) are at their own extremes in each RGB
channel, just like black (#000) and white (#fff). Thus, the
contrast filter produces a similar thresholding effect on
each colour in CMYK independently and simultaneously!
Note: This is not a very accurate representation of halftone, mainly due to the operations being in RGB, not CMY. An accurate simulation would be to apply thresholding to each channel in some CMY space via JS or maybe WebGL. But this shallow emulation may look good enough in many cases.
Here’s the result…?
Only magenta is showing, because the magenta layer is the top layer in
that background-image list! The other layers are hidden
beneath the magenta layer. We need to combine these layers to see all
the colours.
In order to mix the four layers of ‘ink’ correctly, you must use the multipy blend mode to simulate how inks mix together (i.e. subtractive colour mixing).
Since we’re mixing background-images together, we use this
property: background-blend-mode: multiply.
Interactive content: Visit the website to play with interactive content! Alternative text: CSS halftone demo
Aaand that’s it! A simple Halftone effect with a single div wrapper!
This simple filter is not very robust, so you may want to tailor the brightness and saturation levels of the particular source image.
<div class="halftone">
<img src=...>
</div>
<style>
.halftone {
position: relative;
filter: brightness(0.8) blur(3px) contrast(999);
}
.halftone::after {
position: absolute;
inset: 0;
background:
radial-gradient(10px at center, black, white),
radial-gradient(10px at 5px 5px, cyan, white),
radial-gradient(10px at 15px 5px, magenta, white),
radial-gradient(10px at 10px 15px, yellow, white);
background-size: 20px 20px;
background-blend-mode: multiply;
mix-blend-mode: screen;
}
</style>A minor point, but the demo above actually uses two separate overlay divs instead of a single div. This is to achieve better dot staggering.
Variations
Notice anything wrong with the last image above? There’s a weird magenta pattern on that flower petal. In fact, there are more magenta dots than expected!
Apparently, the black dots were turning into the coloured ones. I think the problem was that: coloured source image ⊕ black dot pattern = coloured dots! The symbol ⊕ represents the screen-threshold operation. In other words, colour is contagious!
What I did to fix this was separate the K layer (black) from CMY, and have it use its own greyscale copy of the source image. greyscale source image ⊕ black dot pattern = black dots.
Here’s a vivid example where you can toggle the ‘separate-K’ version for comparison purposes:
Interactive content: Visit the website to play with interactive content! Alternative text: CSS halftone demo
There are more ways to go about this with different qualities and levels of realism and complexity. For example, dithering.
I think the single-div solution is actually fine as long as you tweak the source image to be more readable under the filter.
Gallery
To finish with, here are a more demos!
Interactive content: Visit the website to play with interactive content! Alternative text: CSS halftone demo
Interactive content: Visit the website to play with interactive content! Alternative text: CSS halftone demo
Interactive content: Visit the website to play with interactive content! Alternative text: CSS halftone demo
Interactive content: Visit the website to play with interactive content! Alternative text: CSS halftone demo
P.S. Please don’t look at the demos’ source code. It’s terrible.
https://leanrada.com/notes/pure-css-halftone?ref=rss
Swiss PGDay 2024: Schedule Published
date: 2024-05-05, from: PostgreSQL News
We are pleased to announce that the schedule for the Swiss PGDay 2024 has been released. The conference will take place on Thursday, 27 June and Friday, 28 June 2024 at the University of Applied Sciences of Eastern Switzerland, Campus Rapperswil (near Zurich).
The program committee was able to put together an attractive schedule for the conference. We thank everyone who submitted a proposal during the CfS.
The conference will last two days with two tracks. Presentations will be mainly in English, but also in German (and there will be at least one presentation in English in each time slot).
Registration as well as the Call for Sponsors is open.
The Call for Poster descriptions will remain open until 15 May 2024. Posters will be displayed in the exhibition area. Poster presenters are encouraged to also present in the lightning talk session. Registration for lightning talks will be open during the conference.
For updated information on Swiss PGDay, visit the website or follow us on Mastodon.
We look forward to seeing you in Rapperswil!
Best regards,
Swiss PGDay Organizing Committee
This is a community conference according to the PostgreSQL Community Conference Recognition Guidelines. “PGDay” is a registered trademark of PostgreSQL Europe, used with their permission.
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/swiss-pgday-2024-schedule-published-2856/
Full Circle Weekly News 364
date: 2024-05-05, from: Full Circle Magazine
Credits
- Host: @bardictriad, @zaivala
- Bumper: Canonical
- Theme Music: From The Dust - Stardust
- https://soundcloud.com/ftdmusic
- CC BY 4.0