Pasta News Network - New Zealand

Big news for people who like news about the Biden administration’s ban of the sale of advanced semiconductor chips and chipmaking equipment to China: The United States has reportedly brought the Japanese and Dutch governments on board.

This is the biggest development in this story since the ban went into effect in October, reports Bloomberg, because Japan and the Netherlands are home to some of those critical equipment manufacturers. It’s very difficult to make these top-of-the-heap chips, the kinds needed to run things like supercomputers and self-driving cars and weapons platforms. And what makes the U.S. ban so devastating is that it goes after the tools needed to make them. China needs these tools to continue the development of its relatively underdeveloped domestic semiconductor industry. And even as most of the manufacture of advanced chips is located offshore in places like Taiwan, a lot of the highly specialized equipment needed to make chips is actually American-made.

The question is, what right does the U.S. have in interfering with the economic evolution of another country in this manner. Second China has the capacity to simply "brute force" computational power. You don't need the latest and greatest, you just need more nodes.

Direct Stream Digital (DSD) has become a big thing in high-end digital audio. Simplified encoding and decoding, along with ultra-high sampling frequencies, promise unparalleled performance. Is this what we’ve all been waiting for or just mass-marketing hype? This blog separates the hype from the technical facts. I’ll explain in what ways DSD has the advantage and in what ways pulse-code modulation (PCM) is better.

If you're not sure if you should believe the statements in this blog which contradict much of the marketing hype, myth, and legend in the audiophile industry, feel free to check the references at the end of this blog.

As always, keep in mind Audio is a very subjective thing.

It is 2023 now. The struggle to keep feature and UX parity with proprietary counterparts is far from over for free/libre software projects. But the boneheaded people among us also have something to celebrate. We are witnessing that moment in time when, despite its many shortcomings, free software is good enough to help us do our job. Not in every use case, but increasingly often and pretty darn efficiently.

This is the moment where you can do an architectural design for a client with BlenderBIM, use OBS to screencast the process, then use Kdenlive to cut raw footage of that house being actually built, compose the background music with MuseScore, record a voiceover with Audacity, mix and master the entire soundtrack with Ardour, then publish the video to YouTube. And, for the most part, this will be business as usual.

I look forward to a time, where most "every day needs for every day things" are met with open source technology.

A great list, worth exploring.

Getty Images is suing Stability AI, creators of popular AI art tool Stable Diffusion, over alleged copyright violation.

In a press statement shared with The Verge, the stock photo company said it believes that Stability AI “unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright” to train its software and that Getty Images has “commenced legal proceedings in the High Court of Justice in London” against the firm.

Getty Images CEO Craig Peters told The Verge in an interview that the company has issued Stability AI with a “letter before action” — a formal notification of impending litigation in the UK. (The company did not say whether legal proceedings would take place in the US, too.)

Whoops.

These days Apple is associated with the iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook – game-changing products so wildly successful that they have changed the way we live. But even the most valuable company in the world has had its fair share of marketing missteps and hardware blunders.

Apple wasn't always as profitable as it is today, and the failure of some of its earlier products would have doomed most other tech companies to the annals of history. Here we take a look back at some of Apple's most infamous hardware flops. See if you agree, and let us know in the comments of any other questionable Apple devices that you think deserve to be named and shamed.

Accurate list.

Three things:

• Newton was under appreciated.
• Still want to see a Pippin in action one day.
• Pricing the G4 Cube at the same price as an expandable G4 Tower was never a good idea, otherwise a beautiful piece of engineering.

For the fourth year in a row, Sony brought its electric car prototype to CES to show it off to a global audience. But this year we finally got what we’ve wanted all along: a production date. We also got a name: “AFEELA.”

According to Sony’s presentation, the car will start US preorders in the first half of 2025, and the first shipment will be delivered to North American customers in spring 2026.

In terms of specs, we didn’t hear a whole lot new this year. Presumably it will have the same or similar specs as were announced originally – 400kW (536hp) dual-motor all-wheel-drive, 0-100km/h (0-62mph) in 4.8 seconds, and a top speed of 240km/h (149mph). We still have no information on price or battery size.

Was not expecting to hear the name Sony and EV's in the same sentence, but if you make most of the worlds image sensors and have several successful software platforms then why not.

Looks civilised with enough "future glam" but that name though...

One week in 2007, two friends (Dean and Bill) independently told me they were amazed at Google's spelling correction. Type in a search like [speling] and Google instantly comes back with Showing results for: spelling. I thought Dean and Bill, being highly accomplished engineers and mathematicians, would have good intuitions about how this process works. But they didn't, and come to think of it, why should they know about something so far outside their speciality?

I figured they, and others, could benefit from an explanation. The full details of an industrial-strength spell corrector are quite complex. But I figured that in the course of a transcontinental plane ride I could write and explain a toy spelling corrector that achieves 80 or 90% accuracy at a processing speed of at least 10 words per second in about half a page of code.

Noice. Spell checking is one of those under-appreciated modern creature comforts that everyone takes for granted nowadays. (Just like how typeset letters "magically" appear on your screen.)

Also check out the rest of his web-page.

_"The FBI issued a public notice this week advising consumers to watch out for scammers impersonating advertisements. The Bureau’s solutions included using an ad blocker so the fraudulent ads (along with real ones) don’t appear.

"Users who search for companies on Google these days usually see the word “ad” next to the first couple of search results from companies that buy ads on the service. The FBI warns that some malicious actors are buying ads while impersonating real companies in elaborate schemes to scam customers and deliver malware."

Or maybe web-pages should do better vetting of ad networks, or curate ads themselves before serving them.

The new JPEG XL standard needs dramatically less storage space than JPEG while offering top image quality, factors that helped persuade the photo experts at Adobe to embrace the technology. But Google's Chrome team has just rejected the photo format in favor of a rival technology.

JPEG XL is an industry standard, but Google likes a rival it helped develop called AVIF, and Apple iPhones shoot photos in yet another format, HEIC.

But unlike EternalBlue, which could be exploited when using only the SMB, or server message block, a protocol for file and printer sharing and similar network activities, this latest vulnerability is present in a much broader range of network protocols, giving attackers more flexibility than they had when exploiting the older vulnerability.

“An attacker can trigger the vulnerability via any Windows application protocols that authenticates,” Valentina Palmiotti, the IBM security researcher who discovered the code-execution vulnerability, said in an interview. “For example, the vulnerability can be triggered by trying to connect to an SMB share or via Remote Desktop. Some other examples include Internet exposed Microsoft IIS servers and SMTP servers that have Windows Authentication enabled. Of course, they can also be exploited on internal networks if left unpatched.”

The goal is to move away from initrd images being generated on the installed machine where possible. The initrd is generated while building the kernel package instead, then shipped as part of a unified kernel image (UKI).

A unified kernel image is an all-in-one efi binary containing kernel, initrd, cmdline and signature. The secure boot signature covers everything, specifically the initrd is included which is not the case when the initrd gets loaded as separate file from /boot.

Main motivation for this move is to make the distro more robust and more secure.

Supporting unified kernels for all use cases quickly is not realistic though. Too many features are depending on the current workflow with a host-specific initrd (and host-specific kernel command line), which is fundamentally incompatible with unified kernels where everybody will have the same initrd and command line. Thats why there is 'Phase 1' in title, so we can have more Phases in future releases.

The fourth beta for Haiku R1 over a year and a half of hard work to improve Haiku’s hardware support and its overall stability, and to make lots more software ports available for use. Over 400 bugs and enhancement tickets have been resolved for this release.

Please keep in mind that this is beta-quality software, which means it is feature complete but still contains known and unknown bugs. While we are increasingly confident in its stability, we cannot provide assurances against data loss.

Blessed BeOS fork.

Vim is the greatest or the worst text editor of all time, depending on the tribe you’re in. Either way, members of both camps can appreciate this build from [Chris Price], which uses a foot pedal to ease operations for the user.

The basic concept was to use a pedal to enable switching between normal and insert modes. In Vim’s predecessor, vi, switching modes was easy, with the ESC key located neatly by the Q on the keyboard of the ADM-3A terminal. On modern keyboards, though, it’s a pain, and so a foot pedal is a desirable solution. In the Vim world, it’s referred to as a “Vim clutch.”

We are pleased to announce the release of GNU Guix version 1.4.0!

The release comes with ISO-9660 installation images, a virtual machine image, and with tarballs to install the package manager on top of your GNU/Linux distro, either from source or from binaries—check out the download page. Guix users can update by running guix pull.

It’s been 18 months since the previous release. That’s a lot of time, reflecting both the fact that, as a rolling release, users continuously get new features and update by running guix pull; but let’s face it, it also shows an area where we could and should collectively improve our processes. During that time, Guix received about 29,000 commits by 453 people, which includes important new features as we’ll see; the project also changed maintainers, structured cooperation as teams, and celebrated its ten-year anniversary!

This week's KDE update with notably =

Wayland Fractional Scaling

“What does this do?” you might ask. It allows the Qt toolkit to turn on its pre-existing fractional scaling support on Wayland that it always had on X11. No more rendering to an integer size and then scaling down! This should result in Qt apps that are scaled to anything other than 100%, 200%, or 300% scale having better performance, less visual blurriness, and lower power usage.

Nice Things.

Multi-Screen

That’s all changed. You can read the details here. In a nutshell, we now use an index-based system, with index numbers bound very tightly to Plasma containments, but index numbers themselves being able to move between screens based on how many screens there are. So for example, when screen 1 with your Plasma desktop and panel becomes unavailable, a new screen becomes screen 1, and the Plasma desktop and panel bound move over to it.

Worth reading in full.

Here are some specs up front, if you’re satisfied with piecing the story together yourself:

• The code is on GitHub
• Emulated RISC-V rv32ima/su+Zifencei+Zicsr instruction set
• 64 MiB of RAM minus CPU state is stored in a 2048x2048 pixel Integer-Format texture (128 bpp)
• Unity Custom Render Texture with buffer-swapping allows encoding/decoding state between frames
• A pixel shader is used for emulation since compute shaders and UAV are not supported in VRChat

Around March 2021 I decided on writing an emulator capable of running a full Linux Kernel in VRChat. Due to the inherent limitations of that platform, the tool of choice had to be a shader. And after a few months of work, I’m now proud to present the worlds first (as far as I know) RISC-V CPU/SoC emulator in an HLSL pixel shader, capable of running up to 250 kHz (on a 2080 Ti) and booting Linux 5.13.5 with MMU support

Yes.

“This is our time,” said Redmond. “RISC-V is absolutely the definition of open computing. We have knocked down barriers and we have risen to opportunities. We have overcome challenges and reduced the barriers to entry.”

Next, she made the perhaps bold claim that RISC-V is inevitable. “It's here already,” she said. "It is going across all domains in computing. It is inevitable.” This intriguing notion of RISC-V being inevitable was later echoed and fleshed out in Krste Asanovic’s keynote, which we examine below.

Redmond then turned to discussing the global reach that RISC-V has achieved. “RISC-V is already seen in 10 billion cores globally,” she said. "Innovation is accelerating across all domains, from the lowest power to the highest performance. We’re seeing collective investment and understanding around the world. This ranges from companies investing and pivoting their strategies to RISC-V, to entire nations and regions investing in RISC-V.”

More please.

The new version also has improved subsystems and supporting libraries, enabling non-native applications to be ported from Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. It has translation layers for both X11 and Wayland, as well as for Gtk apps, alongside the WINE support it gained this time last year. This means a number of new apps, including the GNOME Web browser Epiphany, a full graphical version of Emacs, updated POSIX layer, WINE, and more.

This version is built with GCC, but which version of GCC depends on which edition of Haiku you choose. There are both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. The x86-32 edition is still built with an ancient version of GCC, because it remains binary-compatible with the final x86-32 versions of BeOS. If the Haiku developers move to a newer GCC, that will break backwards compatibility. At some point, though, the x86-32 version will probably go away. The 64-bit version is built with GCC 11 and ran flawlessly on an old BIOS-based ThinkPad and in VirtualBox.

A nice review which also touches upon some BeOS history.

The fear among those who shared the tweet was simple: That Photoshop, and other Adobe products, are tracking artists that use their apps to see how they work—in essence, stealing the processes and actions that graphic designers have developed over decades of work to mine for its own automated systems. The concern is that what is a complicated, convoluted artistic process becomes possible to automate—meaning “graphic designer” or “artist” could soon join the long list of jobs at risk of being replaced by robots.

Meanwhile in open source lands:

• Krita is amazing.
• GIMP has an interface that makes sense nowadays.

If you do not like what a software product is doing, stop supporting the vendor and take your time, effort and money elsewhere. We have choices now, unlike 2 decades ago when many proprietary tools were best in class.

One of these terms is "brick nogging". They use this name to describe many types of surface-mount headers and connectors. But that name makes almost no sense in the context of such a component! ???

As a native Chinese speaker, "brick nogging" is gibberish and completely incomprehensible to me. :-DD I was curious and just looked it up, apparently it was a mistranslation of "立贴".

"立" means "standing" or "vertical", and "贴" is the short-hand for "贴片", which means "pick-and-place" or "SMD", so it just means "vertical SMD".

One thing to know about Chinese is that one can create almost entirely arbitrary abbreviations and short-hands by combining characters from different words, a bit similar to Soviet and Russian government agency names like GosPlan, RosCosmos, or RosKomNadzor.

The result is often not found in the dictionary, or by coincidence, they may clash with another existing but obscure word in the dictionary. In both cases, machine translation would produce incomprehensible results. For example, in this case it happens to form a word from architectural history.

A man is amused, a man also wanted to test Unicode in posts. Also "Cow Connectors".

A nice internet thread with many historical curiosities.

During the early development of Safari, I didn’t just worry about leaking our secret project through Apple’s IP address or our browser’s user agent string. It also concerned me that curious gawkers on the outside would notice who I was hiring at Apple.

Other than a bit part in a documentary about Netscape that aired on PBS, I wasn’t known to anyone but a few dozen other geeks in The Valley. Of course, several of those folks were aware I was now at Apple and working on some project I wouldn’t say anything about. And it doesn’t take many people in this town to snowball a bit of idle speculation.

Praise for 20 years of KHTML. The modern day world owes a-lot to the KDE project.

Hat Tip to Uncle Gruber.

Earlier today, Creative Technology announced that Sim who was its Chairman and CEO passed away [pdf] yesterday at the age of 67. The role of interim CEO has since been assumed by the President of the Creative Labs Business Unit, Song Siow Hui while the company’s Lead Independent Non-Executive Director, Lee Kheng Nam has taken over as the acting Chairman.

After Sim established Creative Technology as a computer repair shop back in 1981, the company has then developed a series of PCs called Cubic between 1984 to 1986. However, things only picked up a few years later with the introduction of the Sound Blaster sound card in 1989.

Many a DOS gaming session, was made amazing by having an Sound Blaster card. Thank you.

One of the world’s most prestigious machine learning conferences has banned authors from using AI tools like ChatGPT to write scientific papers, triggering a debate about the role of AI-generated text in academia.

The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) announced the policy earlier this week, stating, “Papers that include text generated from a large-scale language model (LLM) such as ChatGPT are prohibited unless the produced text is presented as a part of the paper’s experimental analysis.” The news sparked widespread discussion on social media, with AI academics and researchers both defending and criticizing the policy. The conference’s organizers responded by publishing a longer statement explaining their thinking.

In fairness, GPT is more then a "spellchecker".

As a thank-you to our army of very patient enthusiast customers in the run-up to the holiday season this year, we’ve been able to set aside a little over a hundred thousand units, split across Zero W, 3A+ and the 2GB and 4GB variants of Raspberry Pi 4, for single-unit sales. These are flowing into the Approved Reseller channel now, and this is already translating into better availability figures on rpilocator.

While we’re not quite out of the woods yet, things are certainly improving. For those of you looking to buy a Raspberry Pi for hobby projects or prototyping, the advice we gave back in April still holds: always buy from an Approved Reseller (they’re under contract with us to sell at no more than the RRP); use tools like rpilocator to keep an eye on which resellers have recently received stock; and consider whether your project is a good fit for Raspberry Pi Pico or Pico W, which remain in a strong stock position.

Looking forward to an Rpi 4 or 400 at reasonable price in the near future.

"The primary cause identified was a problem with the power supply and the degraded uninterrupted power supply, which had no link to the commercial power, and had to be connected to the other manually. The secondary problem was the power surge due to the power outage, which affected the equipment," said Bautista.

That power surge occurred when technicians tried to bypass the damaged UPS and sent 380 volts into the system, instead of the intended 220 volts, thus frying the terminals that receive satellite data from airplanes and air traffic management systems.

I am scared to think what the switch board looked like.

We've been trying to nail down how the Android team feels about RISC-V (reduced instruction set computer) for a while. We last heard a comment from the team six months ago, where our Google I/O question about RISC-V was answered only with "we're watching, but it would be a big change for us." Some external RISC-V porting projects exist, and various RISC-V commits have been landing in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), but since anyone can submit code to AOSP, it has been hard to make any bold proclamations about RISC-V's Android status.

Google's keynote at the RISC-V Summit was all about bold proclamations, though. Lars Bergstrom, Android's director of engineering, wants RISC-V to be seen as a "tier-1 platform" in Android, which would put it on par with Arm. That's a big change from just six months ago. Bergstrom says getting optimized Android builds on RISC-V will take "a lot of work" and outlined a roadmap that will take "a few years" to come to fruition, but AOSP started to land official RISC-V patches back in September.

A good compiler and toolchain do not happen overnight, and then you have to optimise your software to take advantage or work around certain silicon behaviours. Sometimes Google does nice things.

Platform transitions aren't easy either, Apple is the only company that I have seen and experienced doing it well.

MegaFace is a large-scale public face recognition training dataset that serves as one of the most important benchmarks for commercial face recognition vendors. It includes 4,753,320 faces of 672,057 identities from 3,311,471 photos downloaded from 48,383 Flickr users' photo albums. All photos included a Creative Commons licenses, but most were not licensed for commercial use.

This analysis explores how the MegaFace face recognition dataset exploited the good intentions of Flickr users and the Creative Commons license system to advance facial recognition technologies around the world by companies including Alibaba, Amazon, Google, CyberLink, IntelliVision, N-TechLab (FindFace.pro), Mitsubishi, Orion Star Technology, Philips, Samsung1, SenseTime, Sogou, Tencent, and Vision Semantics to name only a few. According to the press release from the University of Washington, "more than 300 research groups [were] working with MegaFace" as of 2016, including multiple law enforcement agencies.

Remember, it is fine if (((they))) do it.

Something remarkable is happening. For the past two weeks, people have been leaving Twitter. Many others are reducing their reliance on it. Great numbers of ex-Twitter users and employees are making a new home in the “fediverse,” fleeing the chaos of Elon Musk’s takeover. This exodus includes prominent figures from civil society, tech law and policy, business and journalism. It also represents a rare opportunity to make a better corner of the internet…if we don’t screw it up.

The fediverse isn’t a single, gigantic social media platform like Facebook or Twitter. It’s an expanding ecosystem of interconnected social media sites and services that let people interact with each other no matter which one of these sites and services they have an account with.

ActivityPub as a standard arrived in 2018 and it would be great to see a larger contingent of federated services with easy access.

Worth reading in full.

We’ve reached a significant milestone of $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) with Plausible Analytics, a simple, lightweight, open source and privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics.

We’re a completely independent, self-funded and bootstrapped team of four. We’re intentionally small, profitable and sustainable. More than 7,000 paying subscribers trust us, and we’re actively counting stats on more than 50,000 websites with more than a billion monthly page views.

We’ve never paid to advertise for Plausible. Our growth comes organically from word of mouth.

It’s time to reflect on how we got to where we are. This post summarizes how we built a $1M ARR open source SaaS.

Keeping a product open source and commercial is all about finding the "convenience" factor.

At over thirty years old, HTTP is still the foundation of the web and one of the Internet’s most popular protocols—not just for browsing, watching videos and listening to music, but also for apps, machine-to-machine communication, and even as a basis for building other protocols, forming what some refer to as a “second waist” in the classic Internet hourglass diagram.

What makes HTTP so successful? One answer is that it hits a “sweet spot” for most applications that need an application protocol.

HTTP/2 is pretty well supported now, HTTP/3 sound promising in standardising QUIC.

MASQUE sounds neat but also potential security considerations.

Meanwhile, cannot help but feel there is alot of scope creep happening and that HTTP/1.1 remains the most practical point in the spec.