Enlarge/ A brown bear with two cubs looks out of its den in the woods under a large rock in winter. (credit: Byrdyak | Getty)
Every spring, as days in the north stretch longer and melting snow trickles into streams, drowsy animals ranging from grizzlies to ground squirrels start to rally from hibernation. It’s tempting to say that that they are “waking up,” but hibernation is more complicated and mysterious than a simple long sleep: Any animal that can spend months underground without eating or drinking and still emerge ready to face the world has clearly mastered an amazing trick of biology.
The roster of animals that hibernate includes all manner of rodents, some amphibians and even a few primates (several species of dwarf lemurs), but bears are literally the biggest hibernators of them all. Adult grizzly and black bears weigh as much as American football players, or more, with the energy and curiosity of preschoolers, but they have no trouble hunkering down for months at time. The choreography that goes into shutting down a creature this big defies easy explanation, says Elena Gracheva, a neurophysiologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. “Hibernation is so complex it requires adaptations at multiple levels,” she says.
Bear hibernation offers important insights into the workings of large mammals, especially us, explains Gracheva, who coauthored an exploration of the physiology of hibernation in the 2020 Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology. A better understanding of the process could potentially change our approach to a wide range of human conditions, including stroke, osteoporosis, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s (see sidebar).
Sent in this morning for the Linux 5.19 merge window were the OverlayFS updates of which the main feature addition this cycle is support for IDMAPPED layers…
One of the open questions this merge window is whether the MIPS64-based LoongArch CPU architecture port of the kernel will manage to land for the Linux 5.19 cycle. There has been a discussion this holiday weekend by upstream kernel developers and looks like it may still land, but possibly without necessary hardware drivers included…
The United States is on top of the supercomputing world in the Top500 ranking of the most powerful systems. The Frontier system from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) running on AMD EPYC CPUs took first place from last year’s champ, Japan’s ARM A64X Fugaku system. It’s still in the integration and testing process at the ORNL in Tennessee, but will eventually be operated by the US Air Force and US Department of Energy.
Frontier, powered by Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) Cray EX platform, was the top machine by a wide margin, too. It’s the first (known) true exascale system, hitting a peak 1.1 exaflops on the Linmark benchmark. Fugaku, meanwhile, managed less than half that at 442 petaflops, which was still enough to keep it in first place for the previous two years.
Frontier was also the most efficient supercomputer, too. Running at just 52.23 gigaflops per watt, it beat out Japan’s MN-3 system to grab first place on the Green500 list. “The fact that the world’s fastest machine is also the most energy efficient is just simply amazing,” ORNL lab director Thomas Zacharia said at a press conference.
Other machines in the TOP10 include another HPE Cray EX system install at EuroHPC in Finland (151.9 petaflops), the IBM-built Summit system using 22-core Power( CPUs and NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs (148.8 petaflops) and Lawrence Livermore’s Sierra, a smaller-scale version of Summit that hit 94.6 Pflop/s.
China held two top-ten spots with its Sunway TaihuLight from the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC) and Tianhe-2A built by China’s National University of Defense Technology (NUDT). However, China is rumored to already have no less than two exascale systems (according to the Linmark benchmark) on new Sunway Oceanlite and Tianhe-3 systems. Due to the current state of semiconductor politics, however, China is reportedly not revealing any new benchmarks or important advances.
Akihabara News (Tokyo) — Autonomous Control Systems Laboratory (ACSL) is Japan’s largest drone manufacturer and the only one with a stock market listing, but it is still struggling to achieve profitability.
In its latest financial report issued earlier this month, covering the January-March 2022 period, ACSL reported that its quarterly sales reached a record high of ¥952 million (US$7.5 million)–or over ¥1.3 billion (US$10.6 million) if its sales backlog was factored in.
Nevertheless, the profit margin on its drone sales was only about 14%. When R&D and operating expenses are accounted for, the firm suffered a net financial loss of about ¥400 million (US$3.2 million) during the quarter.
ACSL expects that these losses won’t get much worse during the course of this year, pinning its hopes on what it calls its four “application-specific” drone models.
Leading the pack is Soten, its aerial photography drone, which aims for a high standard of data security. The first units shipped in March, and by the end of that same month 475 had been sent to buyers.
ACSL has been hoping that data security allegations surrounding drones manufactured by the Chinese giant DJI will give them an opening to penetrate both the domestic and international markets.
An earlier ACSL drone model, the Fi4, is built for the inspection of sewers and drains, and they anticipate racking up sales in this niche market as well.
A third model–for which orders are now being taken–is the AirTruck delivery drone. Prototype versions are already operating in some rural parts of Japan as part of the SkyHub grocery delivery service. The AirTruck is noted for its easy loading process, capacity to carry a 5 kilogram payload, and the soft deposit of packages.
Finally, a fourth application-specific model designed for inspection of smokestacks and water-pressure towers is slated for release sometime later this year.
Looking beyond Japan, ACSL partnered last May with a firm called Aeroarc with ambitious plans to enter the India market. The partners anticipate that low manufacturing costs and concerns about Chinese drones will produce many new opportunities.
ACSL, however, is at this stage declining to make any specific financial projections regarding its potential India operations, which still need to gain official approvals.
ACSL’s managers project optimism about the future, declaring that the world has entered an “Era of the Drones” and that most macroeconomic factors suggest a bright future ahead.
On the other hand, it should also be noted that investors have not yet been equally enamored of its prospects. In May 2019, ACSL stock price reached a peak of ¥5,050 (US$39.90) per share, but it has steadily declined to only ¥1,905 (US$15.05) at the present time, a slide of over 62%.
ACSL was founded as a startup in November 2013, gained listing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Mothers market in December 2018, and currently boasts about 75 employees.
It started in 2016 co-organized by Japan UAS Industrial Development Association (JUIDA) and Congrès, Inc. It has become the biggest exhibition and conference in drone industry gathering over 10,000 visitors every year.
Learn some of the modern alternatives to Linux commands that you might consider trying out. They are more effective and ship with added functionalities.
As labor shortages continue, “robot orders increased 40% in the first quarter of 2022,” reports Business Insider (citing a report from the Wall Street Journal citing the Association for Advancing Automation).
“People want to remove labor,” Ametek Inc. CEO David A. Zapico told Bloomberg in November, noting that the automatic equipment company had been “firing on all cylinders” to meet demand.
Robots are providing at least a temporary solution for businesses confronted by difficulty hiring in the tightest job market since World War II, marred by the pandemic, record-high quitting rates, and vast economic turmoil…. “The robots are becoming easier to use,” Michael Cicco, chief executive officer of industrial robot provider Fanuc America, told the Wall Street Journal. “Companies used to think that automation was too hard or too expensive to implement.”
But as robot usage climbs, some have expressed concern about the machines displacing human workers as the labor crisis eventually eases.
“Automation, if it goes very fast, can destroy a lot of jobs,” Daron Acemoglu, an economics professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the Journal. “The labor shortage is not going to last. This is temporary.”
North Carolina’s largest newspaper, Raleigh’s News & Observer newspaper, reports that “In the face of stiff opposition from farm equipment companies and dealers, North Carolina state senators on Tuesday walked back a provision that would have widened access to the repair of farming equipment.”
The so-called “right to repair” provision was included in the Farm Act of 2022, Senate Bill 762, which was discussed Tuesday in the Senate’s Agriculture, Energy and Environment Committee. As introduced, the bill would have required manufacturers of farming equipment that relies on digital components to make diagnostic equipment and parts available at “fair and reasonable terms.” Representatives of national farm equipment trade groups and North Carolina equipment dealers opposed the bill. Allowing repairs outside of authorized shops, they argued, could damage equipment, pose a risk of injury, and make it possible for farming equipment to violate the Clean Air Act.
After hearing from seven people, Sen. Brent Jackson, a Sampson County Republican, replaced the right to repair provision with language calling on the General Assembly’s Agricultural and Forestry Awareness Study Commission to evaluate whether further action is necessary.
More from North Carolina TV station WRAL:
Manufacturers and their licensed dealerships counter that they spend millions of dollars stocking parts and training field technicians to service equipment safely and within the parameters of federal laws like the Clean Air Act. More than a dozen dealers and representatives lined up to speak against the provision in the state Senate agriculture committee Tuesday… [Right-to-repair] supporters were far outnumbered by opponents, who warned that giving consumers access to embedded software would allow unsafe or illegal modifications to the equipment, from emissions compliance to safety shutoffs.
Philip Brooks, a dealer from Monroe, said his service techs receive extensive training. “A simple common rail diesel system with a line broken loose with a wrench under pressure can kill a man. We need to be careful of all these things,” he told the committee.
Brian Jennings, a farm equipment dealer from Elizabeth City, testified: “I do not support the attacks — and I call them attacks — on our business. We are contracted dealers. We spend a lot of money to be dealers.”
The developers rolled out a newer version of the Arch Linux text-based installer including beta support of FIDO2 (HSM) support for systemd-boot and many other improvements and changes can be found here:
It was “the furthest any Right to Repair bill for consumer electronics has come to becoming law” in America, reports the nonprofit California Public Interest Research Group.
And yet…
The California Senate Appropriations committee failed to pass Sen. Susan Eggman’s Right to Repair bill, SB 983, on May 19, which would have significantly expanded Californians’ access to the parts, tools, and service information needed to fix consumer electronics and appliances….
The policy had broad, bipartisan support, with 75% of Californians and majorities of both parties supporting Right to Repair. The bill, which passed through the judiciary committee with only a single opposing vote, met the same fate as a similarly popular medical Right to Repair bill that Sen. Eggman introduced in 2021. Sander Kushen, CALPIRG Advocate issued the following statement in response… “SB 983 could have saved California households as much as $4.3 billion a year in reduced spending on electronics and helped Californians reduce toxic electronic waste. Instead, industry groups’ heavy lobbying effort helped to kill the bill.”
“Other states are pursuing similar legislation and there’s also a pending federal bill,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle”
The right-to-repair movement is gaining steam with President Biden as a vocal advocate. In July 2021, he asked the Federal Trade Commission to draft right-to-repair rules. The FTC said it will target repairs restrictions as antitrust violations.
In recent months, major tech players have opened up limited ways to help consumers fix stuff. Apple has said it will sell manuals, parts and tools but only to owners of the iPhone 12 and 13 models. Microsoft said it’s looking into repair options for its computer accessories. Google will sell replacement parts for Pixel smartphones via iFixit, a self-described “wikipedia of repair.”
But they also explore why the California bill failed:
The legislative bill, which would have been the first of its kind in the United States, would have required makers of electronic gear such as cell phones, game consoles, washers and dryers, computers — almost anything with a chip inside — to ease the route to fixing broken stuff by providing parts, tools and manuals at reasonable prices. Supporters pitched it as a no-brainer to save consumers money and reduce e-waste.
But the electronics industry says that it could have created a free-for-all, allowing pirates to flourish, unauthorized people to access sensitive information and trade secrets to be violated… “We’re going up against the rights of some of the biggest companies in the world,” said Kevin O’Reilly, a Right to Repair campaign director with U.S. Public Interest Research Group, or PIRG. He’s also associated with CALPIRG. “Apple and Google and other tech giants have either lobbied against the bill or supported organizations that lobbied against the bill.”
The RZBoard V2L from Avnet, is a Single Board Computer (SBC) that shares a similar design to the Raspberry Pi 4 model B. One of the main differences between these SBCs is that the RZBoard V2L is powered by the powerful RZ/V2L System on Chip (SoC) from Renesas Electronics. Avnet also has these SBCs in stock and they are available for $147.
Mike Bouma (Slashdot reader #85,252) writes:
AmiKit is a compilation of pre-installed and pre-configured Amiga programs running emulated on Windows, macOS, and Linux (as well as running on classic 68K Amigas expanded with a Vampire upgrade card).
Besides original Workbench (Commodore’s desktop environment/graphical filemanager), AmiKit provides Directory Opus Magellan and Scalos as desktop replacements and its “Rabbit Hole” feature allows you to launch Windows, Mac or Linux applications directly from your Amiga desktop! Anti-aliased fonts, Full HD 32-bit screen modes and DualPNG Icons support is included and this package comes with exclusive versions of the Master Control Program (MCP) and MUI 5 (Magic User Interface).
The original AmigaOS (version 3.x) and Kickstart ROM (version 3.1) are required, also the recently released AmigaOS 3.2 is supported. You can also get the needed files from the Amiga Forever package(s). It even supports emulating AmigaOS 4.x (for PowerPC) easily through Flower Pot.
Here’s an extensive overview video by Dan Wood. An Amiga Future review of an earlier 2017 version can be read here.
“Everything began in 1994 when my parents bought an Amiga 500 for me and my brother,” explains AmiKit’s developer.
“I was 14 years old…”
Fast forward to 2005, the AmiKit was born — an emulated environment including more than 350 programs. It fully replaced my old Amiga and it became a legend in the community over the years.
Fast forward to 2017, a brand new AmiKit X is released, originally developed for A.L.I.C.E., followed by the XE version released in 2019, Vampire edition in 2020 and Raspberry Pi in 2021. The latest & greatest version was released in 2020.
When someone, who has never heard about Amiga before, asks me why I would want to turn current modern computer into something retro and old fashioned, my short answer is: “Simply because I love Amiga!”
Akihabara News (Tokyo) — The Renewable Energy Institute, a Tokyo-based think tank, recently released a report contending that Japan’s energy goals for 2050 are too reliant on problematic Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technologies.
The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has indicated that it will introduce a system of mixed power generation in Japan by 2050 which will see renewable energy limited to about 50–60%–a proportion that falls well below the 90% recommended by the International Energy Agency.
Japan hopes to meet its carbon neutral targets through the widespread use of CCS.
CCS denotes the storage of carbon underground in order to keep it from rising into the atmosphere and aggravating the climate crisis. CCS advocates believe that this technology has a crucial role to play in meeting climate obligations.
For its part, the Renewable Energy Institute contends that the Japanese government’s plans are overreliant on CCS as a means to preserve thermal power plants, noting that it is economically inefficient and ultimately not practical.
Indeed, CCS is losing some of the international popularity which it once enjoyed. CCS projects currently in operation are few in number due to the relatively high economic and environmental costs of implementation. Of the 31 CCS projects currently in operation globally, 28 store their carbon in land-based underground reservoirs.
As noted in the Renewable Energy Institute’s report, however, suitable onshore locations within Japan capable of storing large amounts of carbon have not yet been discovered.
Consequently, the Japanese government is now exploring the possibility of storing carbon offshore; that is, beneath the seabed.
The Renewable Energy Institute notes that any attempt to implement such a policy would be extremely costly in comparison to a land-storage system, partially due to the lack of existing research. Furthermore, the technology required to transport carbon to offshore storage sites on an industrial scale has yet to be proven.
One additional possibility that the Japanese government is exploring is to export carbon to overseas sites in Southeast Asia for processing and storage, which could lead to international complications. The Renewable Energy Institute calls this a “double vulnerability.”
The norm for most nations, the report emphasizes, is simply to phase out thermal power plants.
For Japan, earthquakes pose a special risk to CCS storage projects.
Research by the US Department of Energy has concluded that temblors could potentially cause carbon reservoirs to leak, resulting in environmental damage to soil, groundwater, and surface water. Of course, carbon leaking into the atmosphere would also cancel out the expected environmental benefits of the technology.
The report emphasizes that Japan’s current energy strategy does not include plans to research and address this potential threat.
Moreover, studies by Stanford University and the US National Research Council have concluded that CCS is itself capable of triggering earthquakes.
The Renewable Energy Institute fears that the Japanese government’s plans fall far below the emerging global standard for combatting the threat of carbon emissions, and create unnecessary risks.
Denmark-based Poul-Henning Kamp describes himself as the “author of a lot of FreeBSD, most of Varnish and tons of other Open Source Software.” And he shares this message in June’s Communications of the ACM.
“The software industry is still the problem.”
If any science fiction author, famous or obscure, had submitted a story where the plot was “modern IT is a bunch of crap that organized crime exploits for extortion,” it would have gotten nowhere, because (A) that is just not credible, and (B) yawn!
And yet, here we are…. As I write this, 200-plus corporations, including many retail chains, have inoperative IT because extortionists found a hole in some niche, third-party software product most of us have never heard of.
But he’s also proposing a solution.
In Denmark, 129 jobs are regulated by law. There are good and obvious reasons why it is illegal for any random Ken, Brian, or Dennis to install toilets or natural-gas furnaces, perform brain surgery, or certify a building is strong enough to be left outside during winter. It may be less obvious why the state cares who runs pet shops, inseminates cattle, or performs zoological taxidermy, but if you read the applicable laws, you will learn that animal welfare and protection of endangered species have many and obscure corner cases.
Notably absent, as in totally absent, on that list are any and all jobs related to IT; IT architecture, computers, computer networks, computer security, or protection of privacy in computer systems. People who have been legally barred and delicensed from every other possible trade — be it for incompetence, fraud, or both — are entirely free to enter the IT profession and become responsible for the IT architecture or cybersecurity of the IT system that controls nearly half the hydrocarbons to the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S….
With respect to gas, water, electricity, sewers, or building stability, the regulations do not care if a company is hundreds of years old or just started this morning, the rules are always the same: Stuff should just work, and only people who are licensed — because they know how to — are allowed to make it work, and they can be sued if they fail to do so.
The time is way overdue for IT engineers to be subject to professional liability, like almost every other engineering profession. Before you tell me that is impossible, please study how the very same thing happened with electricity, planes, cranes, trains, ships, automobiles, lifts, food processing, buildings, and, for that matter, driving a car.
As with software product liability, the astute reader is apt to exclaim, “This will be the end of IT as we know it!” Again, my considered response is, “Yes, please, that is precisely my point!”
While Intel has long supported GPU-based video decode acceleration on Linux using the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) and more recently via oneVPL under their oneAPI umbrella, with their Intel Media Driver stack they have begun offering support for video decoding using the cross-platform video acceleration extensions to the Vulkan API…
On Sunday, the final day of Disney’s Star Wars Celebration 2022 event, the company shared the first trailer for season two of The Bad Batch. And while we’ve known since last year that Disney planned to continue the series, the new season now has a release timeframe. It will debut on Disney+ this fall.
The trailer the company shared suggests the story will pick up following a time skip that leaves the members of Clone Force 99 looking older than they were in season one. Each one also is also seen wearing updated armor, with squad leader Hunter sporting a new scarf, for instance. As ever, it looks like the group has a tough journey ahead of them as they try to find a place in a changing galaxy. Oh, and there’s a Wookie with a lightsaber.
A release window for season two of The Bad Batch was one of a handful of announcements Disney shared during Star Wars Celebration 2022. We also got our first look at Rogue One prequel Andor and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, the sequel to Respawn’s Fallen Order, in addition to updates on The Mandalorian and Ahsoka.
A Persian-language content moderator for Instagram and a former content moderator have said Iranian intelligence officials offered them money to remove Instagram accounts of journalists and activists….
Both content moderators also accused some Iranian colleagues of exhibiting “pro-regime bias” when reviewing posts on the photo-sharing service. They spoke to the BBC after many Iranian Instagram users complained that posts about recent anti-government protests in their country had been deleted. Instagram’s owner, Meta Platforms, and the third-party company it uses to moderate content said there was no validity to the claims….
The protests received very little coverage on Iranian state media, meaning that Iranians had to rely on Instagram and other social media sites to learn what was happening on the ground. As the unrest continued, users noticed that some videos posted on Instagram were being removed….
The former content moderator told the BBC that he “personally knew some reviewers who supported the Iranian regime and received instructions from Iran”….
All three interviewees said it was likely that some videos of the protests were removed because they included people shouting: “Death to Khamenei”.
Meta has previously said that its guidelines around incitement of violence prohibit calls for the death of a head of state. However, in Iran the phrase “Death to…” is commonly chanted at protests to express discontent with something or someone, rather than to express an actual threat.
