Category: technology

Thinking about the intersection of higher education and climate change sometimes can be daunting in its scope and complexity. Sometimes small, individual stories are a good way into the topic. Today’s case in point: a Russian gas tanker just traveled successfully across most of the Arctic Ocean bordering Asia.  Twice. This is such an extreme…

From the Kara Sea to the college quad — Bryan Alexander

Reading this makes me think of one of those many “stub” storylines sprinkled throughout Breakfast of Champions, where Kilgore Trout is dropping the plots of stories he wrote, submitted to various SciFi magazines, but which relate to what’s ACTUALLY happening to him in the overall story of Breakfast of Champions. One of those droplets was about an alien race who had a species of furry creature not unlike a Koala bear that the they hated so much they literally spent their whole lives as a culture trying to make the creature extinct. And the day when they finally killed it off they marked the moment with a small statue of the creature with the words “Golgongo” emblazoned across the bottom because in their language that was the word for “Extinct”. Reading about the so-called “Northwest Passage” opening up to Oil Tanker traffic from Russia is a moment not unlike reading and being horrified by one of the many Kilgore Trout SciFi stories threaded through Breakfast of Champions.

Arctic is now an Anti-Arctic. Arctic is now Golgongo.

Oh man, reading Gardner Campbell’s blog entry has made me think too, it’s high time to commit to the task and Do the Thing. That’s right, you gotta write. And rather than pester and prod and forward all the neato cool things I bump into, maybe I had better just send them all to the blog on WordPress once and for all. Then, it will at least have a presence, more than a forwarded and ignored email with a link and pithy comment. I don’t mind that being my activity. That’s what I behaviorally fall into. So why not go crazy and just bookmark, link, and comment. Let the Internet and the Search Engines sort it out.

No matter if you are talking about compute or networking, there are two opposing forces that are constantly at interplay on a field of green money. … Why There’s Hard, Cold Cash For Soft, Disaggregated Routing was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Why There’s Hard, Cold Cash For Soft, Disaggregated Routing — The Next Platform

I love reading online articles like this from The Next Platform, and others like EETimes because they fulfil a gap I have in technology reporting that used fill by reading Byte.com. If you want to know what the hyperscale data center type architects, designers are using, the products they select, or the competitors in that rather elite, Formula 1 racing type arena, Next Platform is the only way to go. I first learned about Software Defined Networking about two years ago, when I had to read-up on it for part of a job interview. It’s interesting for people managing some “small” scale racks of servers. But it’s overkill really. The true pay-off is for the large, hyperscale, ultra-dense, ultra-consolidated folks who might have need for optimization, reconfiguration, fail-over, clustering, backup on global scales. Moving workloads, and “zones” around as cycles free up, or weather conditions (meaning cooler temps) make themselves available and the cost per bit comes down. Add things like containerized apps at scale, and the question is, how do you migrate that network infrastructure to something way more horizontal and way less vertical (I remember back to reading about those giant, multi-rack core routers everyone lauded back in 2000-2001 time period). Having a so-called “disaggregated” switch and routing architecture sounds like you have just enough smarts to use a tool set without re-inventing the wheel. And the tool sets are there. DriveNets sounds like a very interesting company and product, and we’ll see how much that disrupts the legacy players in the router/switch market for the Datacenter/Hyperscale market.

In December 7, 1787 the state of Delaware was the first to ratify the U.S. Constitution. And since then, challenges have mounted. I’m reminded of this telling quote from a Senate candidate Abraham Lincoln in June 16, 1858.

“A house divided against itself, cannot stand.”

I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

It will become all one thing or all the other.

Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.^[6]:9

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%27s_House_Divided_Speech

No half steps, not anymore. You either win the day, or your cede the field. And that’s what’s happening now. To paraphrase that racist idiot George Wallace,…
Union today, Union ‘to-morrah’, Union ‘for-evah’.

Here’s to Delaware’s native son, first in the Nation, and now President of the United States, Joseph R. Biden Jr.

You can attend all the inaugurations from now until the end of time.

By Richard Schiffman (an environmental journalis based in New York City)

If I’ve learned anything from the whole sad tale of Big Tobacco going after Jeffrey Wygand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Wigand, it’s that money knows no bounds. Nothing is in good faith ever, apples to apples comparisons, it is about winner take all. And that’s been the approach, the playbook for every opposition research effort since Big Tobacco decided to defend it’s turf back in the early 1960s. This is about gang lords of giant companies all huddling together and figuring out who to punish and take out. Whether it’s groups like ALEC [American Legislative Exchange Council], or British Petroleum, or CRC Advisors, or the American Energy Alliance, or Guy McPherson, they all wish to defend the turf of Big Energy. Just like turning the idea of recycling back onto the consumer, the Big Energy gang are trying to turn back the idea of a carbon footprint back onto the individual. They say, they point at you the individual, it’s you!! It is YOU that have destroyed the environment, caused the global warming. What are YOU doing about it? And that’s not a good faith, apples-to-apples interaction with us, the public. It’s an attempt to defend their turf. So As Professor Michael Mann points out, keep your eye on climate debate. Actions and meaningful laws, change in business practicies means the Climate can be saved. Once that inertial stiction has been broken, we can get this problem solved.

WhatsApp will shortly start to share your data with Facebook as a condition of use of the app. This completes a U-turn which began when Facebook first acquired the app back in 2014. At the time, WhatsApp assured users that their data would remain private, and not be shared with Facebook … more… The post…

WhatsApp will share your data with Facebook whether you like it or not — 9to5Mac

I deleted my Facebook account utterly back in 2018, but continue to use WhatsApp to this day because it bypass SMS messaging charges with my cell phone provider. And with international travel (remember that?) it made it a little easier and more fun to share things with people in real time. But now, I’m questioning that decision. And may have to NOW dump WhatsApp as well. If there’s any intent, spirit of competition left in regulatory agencies that watch Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s actions, I’m hoping they DO decide to breakup Facebook. And if WhatsApp is cast-off as a standalone entity so much the better. But everytime Zuck buys something, I’m going to run away from it like a California wildfire, or a Gulf Coast hurricane, as nothing good can come from sheltering in place against the existential threat of Facebook.

<RANT/>
I don’t know about you, I remember when I first started seeing people using SLRs for video. It was some time back when Ikegami, Sony, Panasonic, JVC were all settling on various kinds of Full HD and not interested in Digital Cinema per se. They were leaving that to the old line camera makers who were designing specialty cameras for the new generation Star Wars series (remember Jar Jar Binks?). Anyways, those top of the line digital cinema jobbies cost $125,000K and only George Lucas was willing to spend that much to get effing 2K resolution (big whoopity do-dah-dey).

Within a few years all the still camera makers were shooting well past 2K for still cams in an arms race to have the highest rez, largest frame size, etc. And Nikon vs. Canon, it seemed like Nikon got there first but within months Canon stole the show. But what nobody tells you is how much people had to effing “mod” their cams in order to make them digital cinema. Meaning, they had to wire up HDMI output jacks to the sensor so they could record with a “studio monitor” device like the Atomos Ninja https://www.atomos.com/ninja/, cuz’ internally Sony and Canon had proprietary video formats and you had “NO” control over any setting for digital cinema. Atomos changed that dynamic by saying, “Camera maker, give me your sensors, I will do the rest” and that’s the way it worked. Atomos could record and save out to ProRes or Avid formats all day long. Any framesize/frame rate you wanted. Digital cinema finally came down in price. However at the end of the day those cameras were STILL digital still cameras.

And that’s what brings me to this video right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1u-9YqrIJc

‘Cuz the thing is,… I noticed all the digital still videographers (even the old mainline Sony/Ikegami/Panasonic/JVC guys) when the adopted SLRs, always used 2 cameras? That became a thing suddenly. Always two cameras when in the old days it was one Betcam SP shoulder mounted camera or tripod mounted. SLR videographers were buying those add-on rails for their tripods so they could mount two heads on one tripod and have 2 cameras. Again, why two? Why did that become a thing when still cams became video digital cinema cams?

It was because of the HEAT! OMG! the heat. Those kick-ass, high-rez CMOS sensors were not like our old CCD friends from years ago. And the SLR cam folks weren’t old-line video cam makers either (Although Canon “did” have some amount of Video cam knowledge it could have leveraged). So I say Canon of all the manufacturers should have known better once SLRs were being used for digital cinema. Except for Canon, all the old video cams makers know one thing from the “tube” era was that Saticon, and Vidicon tubes run hot, and they used to have water coolers built-in to those giant monster TV studio cams back in the 50s and 60s and 70s (before CCD took hold in the 80s with Betacam SP). So why did this happen? My guess is, that aside from Canon, the SLR still cameras are made by old photo still cam manufacturers. So the poor digital cinematographers all said, “Well, let’s workaround the thermal overload on these cams like a bucket brigade putting out a fire.” Use cam #1 until it overheats, the use cam #2 while cam #1 cools off. All of this just to record at 4K instead of George Lucas’s measly 2K for Jar Jar Binks.

Which brings us to ALL the mods the British guy in the YouTube video made (DIY Perks). That guy more or less in 20minutes shows WHY everyone bought 2 still cams to do the work of single, solitary older generation VIDEO camera. It proves Canon doesn’t care, Nikon doesn’t care. They charge you $4,000 for that Canon R5 with 8K full frame sensor with a gorgeous dynamic range LUT. But then they don’t cool it for shit. So now you have to buy 2 of these hunks of metal and run them for 20 minutes each. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

And that British guy in the video demonstrates how easy it would be for Canon to add adequate cooling to their $4K cam to get access to all it’s neato keen features (stabilization on teh sensor, dynamic range, full frame, 8K!)