A 14 week Introduction to Computer Science course.

This course is targeted to middle school grades 6-8 (ages 11-14 years). It is also written for teachers who may not have a Computer Science background, or who may be teaching an “Intro to Computer Science” course for the first time.

This course takes approximately 14 weeks to complete, spending about 1 week on each of the first 11 lessons, and 3 weeks for students to complete the final project at the end. Of course, teachers should feel free to customize the curriculum to meet individual school or district resources and timeframe.

Chinese bare metal and dedicated server purveyor Alibaba Cloud has unveiled a new custom-built processor called the Yitian 710, a cloud-first server CPU built on TSMC’s 5nm manufacturing process (the same as Apple’s new M1 Max and M1 Pro) with a staggering 60 billion transistors.

In comparison, Apple’s processor - the M1 Max - has 57 billion transistors, while the AWS Graviton 2 and the AMD EPYC Rome server processors have around 30 and 40 billion transistors each respectively.

Based on Arm’s v9 architecture, the Yitian 710 packs a staggering 128 cores and can reach speeds of up to 3.2GHz and supports up to eight DDR5 memory channels and 96 PCIe 5.0 lanes. We know that it is a muti-processor platform as well.

"You're taking the halon away?!" the PFY gasps.

"We have to," the Boss responds.

"It's the Montreal Protocol," the fire engineer says. "You shouldn't even have halon in the first place."

The root cause of the worldwide outage appears to be a flubbed BGP route update.

Dane Knecht
@dok2001
. @Facebook DNS and other services are down. It appears their BGP routes have been withdrawn from the internet. @Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 started seeing high failure in last 20mins.
12:01 PM · Oct 4, 2021

A consortium of companies including Intel, Motorola, and AMD began studying EUV as the next step in lithography in the 1990s. ASML joined in 1999, and as a leading maker of lithography technology, sought to develop the first EUV machines. Extreme ultraviolet lithography, or EUV for short, allows a much shorter wavelength of light (13.5 nanometers) to be used, compared with deep ultraviolet, the previous lithographic method (193 nanometers).

But it has taken decades to iron out the engineering challenges. Generating EUV light is itself a big problem. ASML’s method involves directing high-power lasers at droplets of tin 50,000 times per second to generate high-intensity light. Lenses absorb EUV frequencies, so the system uses incredibly precise mirrors coated with special materials instead. Inside ASML’s machine, EUV light bounces off several mirrors before passing through the reticle, which moves with nanoscale precision to align the layers on the silicon. //

ASML’s new machine introduces an additional trick to produce smaller features on a chip: a larger numerical aperture, which increases the resolution of imaging by allowing light to travel through the optics at different angles. This requires significantly larger mirrors and new software and hardware to precisely control the components. ASML’s current generation of EUV machines can create chips with a resolution of 13 nanometers. The next generation will use High-NA to craft features 8 nanometers in size. //

Demand for faster chips is hardly likely to go down. Mark Lundstrom, a professor at Purdue who began working in the chip industry in the 1970s, wrote an article for Science magazine in 2003 that predicted Moore’s law would run into physical limits within a decade. “In my career, multiple times we thought ‘OK, this is the end,’” he says. “But there's no danger at all that things will slow down in 10 years. We'll just have to do it differently.”

Lundstrom remembers visiting his first microchip conference in 1975. “There was this fellow named Gordon Moore giving a talk,” he recalls. “He was well known within the technical community, but nobody else knew him.”

“And I remember the talk that he gave,” Lundstrom adds. “He said, ‘We will soon be able to place 10,000 transistors on a chip.’ And he added, 'What could anyone possibly do with 10,000 transistors on a chip?’”

The picture above shows a near-optimum spread; we wound up with a thin layer that completely covers the die. Since it didn’t reach the edges, we know we didn't use too much paste, and that it wasn't applied too thick. If you know how large a pea is, beware of literally using a pea-sized blob. A paste ball about 1/10” to 1/6” in diameter should be enough; don’t use more than that! We're talking about a lentil-sized ball here.

Western Digital just launched their 20 TB mechanical hard drive, with 2.2 terabytes per platter and onboard flash memory utilizing OptiNAND technology.

The 20 TB mechanical drive's flash memory is integrated "iNAND UFS embedded flash drive (EFD) on the circuit board," and also performs with a 3D TLC UFS flash memory, the capacity of which has not been released to the public. Western Digital intends to improve reliability and performance with the new drive. //

Another source of information from Western Digital is the lack of whether the 20 TB hard disk utilizes shingled magnetic recording (SMR). From the company's description of the drive, it is safe to assume that the hard disk will use SMR technology due to requiring the unit to record vast quantities of track info.

This recently launched hard drive carries nine discs inside, with each disc using a single disc capacity of close to 2.2TB and using Energy Assisted Perpendicular Recording Technology (ePMR). The magnetic head offers a cutting-edge three-stage drive technology, which enables pinpoint accuracy of the read and write head positions. Western Digital has manufactured the SOC control chip themselves instead of looking at outside resources. //

We should start seeing Western Digital begin shipping in the following months, with a technological expectancy of optimizing spaces on mechanical drives with as high as 50TBs or more over the next several decades.

LTO-9 tapes hit the shelves with a supposed 45TB compressed capacity //

LTO-9 cartridges offer 50% more capacity than LTO-8 tapes, with 18TB native capacity per cartridge, supposedly rising to a whopping 45TB compressed (at a 2.5:1 ratio). Fujifilm says these gains were achieved using barium ferrite (BaFe) particles, which are carefully distributed across the surface of the tape, creating a smooth magnetic layer. //

The next generation tape is also faster than its predecessor, reaching transfer rates of up to 1,000MB/sec compressed (and 440MB/sec native), as compared with 750MB/sec (360MB/sec native) on offer with LTO-8.

New LTO-9 drives are fully backward compatible with LTO-8 cartridges, which should make data migration relatively simple for storage administrators. //

With LTO-9 tapes finally hitting the shelves, questions will also be asked about the long-term future of the hard disk drive, the largest of which have a capacity of 18TB. The archival market is dominated by high-capacity tape and the falling price of SSDs has applied pressure from the opposite direction, squeezing hard drives further into niche markets.

The constraints of physics suggests hard drive capacity cannot keep up with the evolution of tape. According to the LTO Program roadmap, LTO-10 tapes are set to offer an incredible 90TB capacity per cartridge, and tapes as large as 580TB have even been created in lab settings.

LTO-9 cartridges offer 50% more capacity than LTO-8 tapes, with 18TB native capacity per cartridge, supposedly rising to a whopping 45TB compressed (at a 2.5:1 ratio). Fujifilm says these gains were achieved using barium ferrite (BaFe) particles, which are carefully distributed across the surface of the tape, creating a smooth magnetic layer. //

TestDisk is OpenSource software and is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL v2+).

TestDisk is powerful free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software: certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.

A less discussed and yet critical issue involving the comparison between TVs and monitors is sub-pixel structure. Each and every pixel on any full-colour display is made up of a number of sub-pixels. The most common structure is known as RGB, which indicates red, green and blue subpixels in that order.

Almost all PC monitors are RGB – indeed, for computing, anything other than standard RGB is a problem. That’s because operating systems like Windows rely on sub-pixel structure to render fonts accurately and smoothly.

Many TVs also use RGB, but some stick with BGR (blue, then green and then red), and it means computing applications and browsers largely aren’t ideal – while more complex RBGW systems found on some TVs also tend to reduce detail and sharpness.

If a TV uses an IPS panel, it’s probably RGB, while a VA panel could be either RGB or BGR – but as TV makers don’t always list sub-pixel information, this can be much harder to discern with small TVs than with PC monitors.

Each time we eliminate a data vendor like Amazon Web Services, we eliminate a potential 'cancel' moment that could paralyze our site. //

CaucusRoom.com is a social network designed to help conservatives gather, encourage and engage locally. We are a small but growing player among conservative platforms that see a need, and a business opportunity. Operating on the “Cancel Cloud” posed a liability to our company legally, financially, and technically. Now unshackled from Big Tech’s chains, CaucusRoom is better off in every respect.

he arrival of Chia on the mainstream media radar brought with it some challenging and interesting questions here at Backblaze. As close followers of the hard drive market, we were at times intrigued, optimistic, cautious, concerned, and skeptical—often all at once. But, our curiosity won out. Chia is storage-heavy. We are a storage company. What does this mean for us? It was something we couldn’t ignore.

Backblaze has over an exabyte of data under management, and we typically maintain around three to four months worth of buffer space. We wondered—with this storage capacity and our expertise, should Backblaze farm Chia?

For customers who are ready to farm, we recently open-sourced software to store Chia plots using our cloud storage service, Backblaze B2. But deciding whether we should hop on a tractor and start plotting ourselves required a bunch of analysis, experimentation, and data crunching—in short, we went down the rabbit hole.

After proving out if this could work for our business, we wanted to share what we learned along the way in case it was useful to other teams pondering data-heavy cloud workloads like Chia.

Do you want a PET scan from a machine with unauthorized adjustments?

Not long ago, a shade-tree mechanic with average skills could fix whatever was wrong with your car. These days, cars are far more advanced. On-board computers allow cars to diagnose themselves for most common problems and make engines run more efficiently while squeezing out more power than ever before.

All this advanced technology has put the shade-tree mechanic pretty much out of business. Working on a car today requires advanced training and technical ability. The technology inside and outside the car consists of patented software, chip designs and proprietary systems. But the benefit to consumers has been enormous. These inventions are covered by patents to encourage and reward innovation.

American innovation is dependent on the protection of intellectual property. It encourages innovation by discouraging theft. But there are those who are philosophically opposed to intellectual property protection. Left-leaning public interest law firms and activist groups led by U.S. PIRG, an association of public-interest law firms, have been trying for years to undermine intellectual-property protection through “right to repair” campaigns in state legislatures. During this legislative session they are pushing their anti-innovation agenda in the guise of a “right to repair” advanced medical devices.

In my state, Texas, Rep. Thresa Meza has introduced a bill this session titled the Medical Device Right to Repair Act. This bill would require manufacturers of highly advanced medical devices like MRI machines, CT scanners and PE-scan systems to disclose confidential and patented design and service information.

A “right to repair” sounds reasonable, but forcing manufacturers to disclose their proprietary technologies would erode the incentive for innovation and endanger patients. Today the Food and Drug Administration regulates and monitors medical-device safety. The FDA demands that original equipment manufacturers follow its guidelines regarding software updates, patches and more-comprehensive repair jobs. The uncertified third-party service providers who would conduct repairs if these bills pass aren’t regulated by the FDA. There’s no assurance they will follow FDA standards. //

In January, we learned about a Chinese espionage campaign that exploited four zero-days in Microsoft Exchange. One of the characteristics of the campaign, in the later days when the Chinese probably realized that the vulnerabilities would soon be fixed, was to install a web shell in compromised networks that would give them subsequent remote access. Even if the vulnerabilities were patched, the shell would remain until the network operators removed it.

Now, months later, many of those shells are still in place. And they’re being used by criminal hackers as well.

On Tuesday, the FBI announced that it successfully received a court order to remove “hundreds” of these web shells from networks in the US.

This is nothing short of extraordinary, and I can think of no real-world parallel. //

xcv • April 14, 2021 12:32 PM

@ O.P.
xcv But every courthouse in the United States is running on Microsoft’s legal-industry-specific software products. Lexis-Nexis databases, title deed and recording software, court filing software, etc. So some guy is going to end up in the federal penitentiary, and all the court records will be deleted, altered, or hacked on Microsoft software, and after a few years, nobody can even look up any records as to why the guy’s in prison, but they’re never going to let him out, because he’s been classified as a violent felon in the federal prison population.

It makes me wonder what they classify as “violent crime” or not, because pulling the trigger of a handgun with your finger is no more violent than striking a key on a computer keyboard with the same finger — and consequences no longer matter in court — because modern courts no longer require the third of three elements necessary to convict a crime since the time of the ancient Romans, namely

1. mens rea;
2. actus reus; &
3. noxa rea.

The ancient Romans insisted that if (#1) it wasn’t something you intended to do, or (#2) it wasn’t something you really did, or (#3) you did not really harm anyone — then you didn’t commit a crime, and therefore you could not be convicted of a crime.

Modern courts on the other hand have repealed the classical third necessary element of conviction for crime, and omitted due process by either imposing punishment for harmless or victimless acts, or by falsely imputing harm (noxa) where none exists.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/04/the-fbi-is-now-securing-networks-without-their-owners-permission.html/#comment-372456

An Oxford University-trained artificial intelligence expert explains the machinery behind Big Tech's thought suppression, AI speech police, and groupthink on campus.

We conclude that the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results. The system intentionally generates an enormously high number of ballot errors. The electronic ballots are then transferred for adjudication. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency, and no audit trail. This leads to voter or election fraud. Based on our study, we conclude that The Dominion Voting System should not be used in Michigan. We further conclude that the results of Antrim County should not have been certified.

Smooth remote desktop, remote scripting, and rich auto-complete to maximize your IT support efficiency.
Remote Desktop

Instantly connect to remote desktops either unattended or by invite. Invites are started from a single-file, portable executable that's easy for customers to download and use.
Notable Features

• Support for Windows and Linux devices
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• Optional WebRTC for secure peer-to-peer screen transfer on Windows agents, which reduces load on the server
• Drag-and-drop file transfer
• Remote audio streaming (Windows only)
• Bi-directional clipboard sharing
• Integrated chat
• 2-factor authentication

Get Started

Remotely is free and open-source, and there are multiple ways to start using it.

• Download the portable client to try out instant screen sharing
• Create an account on the demo server that we host to try the unattended access and remote scripting
• Install a server package to host a server yourself
• Download and build the source code to host a server yourself

When you're documenting anything technical, it's easy to forget what it's like being ignorant of how the software works, especially if you built the thing.

most people would think that if we’ve built, for example, a space ship or a complex airplane in the past, we could build it again at any time. But no, if we weren’t building a particular plane uninterruptedly, then after just 50 years it is already easier to develop a new one from scratch rather than trying to revive old processes and documentation. Knowledge does not automatically transfer to the next generation.

In programming, we are developing abstractions at an alarming rate. When enough of those are stacked, it becomes impossible to figure out or control what’s going on down the stack. This is where my contribution begins: I believe I have found some pretty vivid examples of how the ladder of abstractions has started to fall and nobody can do anything about it now because we all are used to work only at the very tip of it.

Enter macOS Catalina. Every year Apple releases a new operating system and every year it needs a flagship feature to promote it. This year it was a long-overdue standalone Music app. Well, what could be simpler, right? List of files, categories, filters, smart lists. All that has been around in iTunes at least since 2001. But even if it wasn’t, how hard is it to build a decent music player? Many companies order of magnitude smaller than Apple have done it successfully in the past.

And yet, it didn’t go smoothly. Guys at Annoying.Technology have some great examples. //

As Philipp correctly mentioned,

It’s not some odd, third-party utility that somehow looks a bit funky on an obscure version of macOS. It’s the flagship rewrite of the new Music.app shipping with Catalina. //

Yes, these particular bugs are pretty minor and probably do not affect business in the short run, only Apple’s reputation. Still, it is a big deal. Imagine how tall, opaque and unstable that ladder of abstractions is that it’s even possible to fail such a simple thing as selecting an item in a list??? It is a freaking list and if you click it, it should select a thing that you just clicked. How hard of a task do you think that is? Why it has worked flawlessly since the first iPod with a monochrome screen and quarter of computing power of modern watch, but can’t be done in a flagship product of the most advanced operating system in the world?

Because advanced means complex. So complex that no one could reasonably understand it or have control over it, even if they wanted. Apple DID want it. But even they couldn’t. Even with all the resources in the world. //

I don’t have numbers, but I’ve heard Gmail rewrite also made it much slower with no apparent new functions. It’s still pretty drastic if you put GMail next to Fastmail, or Twitter next to Tweetdeck, both of which didn’t get any full rewrites in the last decade, so you can see how fast even Web UI could be if we weren’t constantly climbing up the abstraction ladder.

Docker and Electron are the most hyped new technologies of the last five years. Both are not about improving things, figuring out complexity or reducing it. Both are just compromised attempts to hide accumulated complexity from developers because it became impossible to deal with.

I've been receiving a lot of responses to the 500-mile email story. Since I originally posted it, it has been forwarded massively, far beyond anything I anticipated. While most of the responses are just to say, "thanks, fun story" or the like, and some have been solicitations for work (thanks, and keep them coming!), a not-insubstantial portion have been of, might I say, the nit-picking variety. Rather than reiterate the points again and again, I've compiled these answers to frequently-asked questions.

1. Did this actually happen, or were you just spinning a yarn?