Et Tu, Red Hat?

June 23, 2023 by Jonathan Bennett 94 Comments

Something odd happened to git.centos.org last week. That’s the repository where Red Hat has traditionally published the source code to everything that’s a part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to fulfill the requirements of the GPL license. Last week, those packages just stopped flowing. Updates weren’t being published. And finally, Red Hat has published a clear answer to why:

Red Hat has decided to continue to use the Customer Portal to share source code with our partners and customers, while treating CentOS Stream as the venue for collaboration with the community.

Sounds innocuous, but what’s really going on here? Let’s have a look at the Red Hat family: RHEL, CentOS, and Fedora.

RHEL is the enterprise Linux distribution that is Red Hat’s bread and butter. Fedora is RHEL’s upstream distribution, where changes happen fast and things occasionally break. CentOS started off as a community repackaging of RHEL, as allowed under the GPL and other Open Source licenses, for people who liked the stability but didn’t need the software support that you’re paying for when you buy RHEL.

Red Hat took over the reigns of CentOS back in 2014, and then imposed the transition to CentOS Stream in 2020, to some consternation. This placed CentOS Stream between the upstream Fedora, and the downstream RHEL. Some people missed the stability of the old CentOS, and in response a handful of efforts spun up to fill the gap, like Alma Linux and Rocky Linux. These projects took the source from git.centos.org, and rebuilt them into usable community operating systems, staying closer to RHEL in the process.

Red Hat has published a longer statement elaborating on the growth of CentOS Stream, but it ends with an interesting statement: “Red Hat customers and partners can access RHEL sources via the customer and partner portals, in accordance with their subscription agreement.” What exactly is in that subscription agreement? Well according to Alma Linux, “the way we understand it today, Red Hat’s user interface agreements indicate that re-publishing sources acquired through the customer portal would be a violation of those agreements.” Continue reading “Et Tu, Red Hat?” →

China Plans Its Own Megaconstellation To Challenge Starlink

June 22, 2023 by Lewin Day 39 Comments

Satellite internet used to be a woeful thing. Early networks relied on satellites in geostationary orbits, with high latency and minimal bandwidth keeping user demand low. That was until Starlink came along, and provided high-speed, low-latency internet access using a fleet of thousands of satellites in Low Earth orbit.

Starlink has already ruffled feathers due to concerns around light pollution and space junk in particular. Now, it appears that China may be readying its own competing constellation to avoid being crowded out of low orbits by the increasingly-popular service.

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Congratulations To Our Op-Amp Challenge Winners!

June 21, 2023 by Elliot Williams 15 Comments

The real world is analog, and the op-amp is the indispensable building block of many analog circuits. We wanted to give you analog fanatics out there a chance to shine and to encourage our digital brothers and sisters to dip their toes in the murky waters where ones and zeroes define the ends of a spectrum rather than representing the only choice. Hence, we presented the Op Amp Challenge. And you did not disappoint!

We received 83 entries, and it was extraordinarily hard to pick the winners. But since we had three $150 DigiKey shopping sprees to give away, our six judges buckled down and picked their favorites. Whether or not you’ve got the Golden Rules of the ideal op-amp tattooed on your arm, you’ll enjoy looking through all of the projects here. But without further ado…

The Winners

[Craig]’s Op Art is an X-Y voltage generator to plug into an oscilloscope and make classic Lissajous and other spirograph-like images, and it’s all done in analog. Maybe it was his incredible documentation, the nice use of a classic three-op-amp tunable oscillator, or the pun hidden in the title. Whatever the case, it wowed our judges and picked up a deserved place in the top three.

Hearkening back to the pre-digital dinosaur days, [Rainer Glaschick]’s Flexible Analog Computer is a modular analog computer prototyping system on a breadboard backplane. Since you have to re-wire up an analog computer for your particular, it’s great that [Rainer] gave us a bunch of examples on his website as well, including a lunar lander and classic Lorenz attractor demos.

And there was no way that [Chris]’s interactive analog LED wave array wouldn’t place in the top three. It’s a huge 2D analog simulation that runs entirely on op-amps, sensing when your hand moves across any part of its surface and radiating waves out from there. You have to admire the massive scale here, and you simply must check out the video of it in action. Glorious!

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This Weekend: VCF Swap Meet In Wall, NJ

June 9, 2023 by Tom Nardi 4 Comments

There was a time where you could regularly find local swap meets to pick up computer hardware, ham radios, and other tech gear at the sort of cut-rate prices so often produced by a sense of camaraderie. But with the rise of websites like Craigslist and eBay, meeting up in person to buy and sell used hardware started to fall out of style. The fact that the prices had to go up due to the considerable cost of shipping such large and heavy objects was an unfortunate side-effect, but it wasn’t enough to stem the tide.

It’s unlikely that we’ll ever truly return to those early days. But if you’re within driving distance of Wall, New Jersey, you can take a step back in time on Saturday and experience a proper swap meet in all its glory. Hosted by the Vintage Computer Federation, the modest $5 entry fee goes to help support their worthy goal of preserving vintage computing history. After the swap meet officially wraps up at 2 PM, a short walk will take you over to their permanent exhibit located within the sprawling InfoAge Science and History Museum.

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Farewell American Computer Magazines

June 1, 2023 by Al Williams 80 Comments

I grew up in a small town with a small library. The next town over had what I thought at the time was a big library, but it was actually more like my town had a tiny library, and the next one over had an actual small library. When I left to go to University, I found out what a real library looked like, and I was mesmerized. Books! Lots of books, many of them written in the current decade. My grades probably suffered from the amount of time I spent in the library reading things that didn’t directly relate to my classes. But there was one thing I found that would turn out to be life-changing: A real computer magazine. Last month, Harry McCracken pointed out that the last two widely-distributed American consumer computer magazines ceased paper publication. It is the end of an era, although honestly, it is more like a comatose patient expiring than a shocking and sudden demise.

Dr. Dobb’s first issue was far from the slick commercial magazine it would become.

Actually, before I had gone to college, I did have a subscription to Kilobaud, and I still have some copies of those. No offense to Wayne Green, but Kilobaud wasn’t that inspiring. It was more an extension of his magazine “73”, and while I enjoyed it, it didn’t get me dreaming. Dr. Dobb’s Journal — the magazine I found in the stacks of my University’s library — was tangibly different. There was an undertone of changing the world. We weren’t sure why yet, but we knew that soon, everyone would have a computer. Maybe they’d balance their checkbook or store recipes. A few people already saw the potential of digital music reproduction, although, I must admit, it was so poor at the time, I couldn’t imagine who would ever care.

I say it was life-changing to discover the few issues of Dr. Dobb’s that were published back then because I would go on to contribute to Dr. Dobb’s throughout its storied history. I wrote the infamous DOS extender series, produced special issues, and, when it went mostly digital, was the embedded system blogger for them for more years than I care to admit. In fact, I have the dubious distinction of having the final blog posted; although the website has suffered enough bit rot, I’m not sure any of it has survived other than, maybe, on the Wayback machine. While I wasn’t with the magazine for its entire 38-year run, I read it for at least 35 and had some function there for about 24 of those.

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Methane-Tracking Satellites Hunt For Nasty Greenhouse Gas Emissions

May 30, 2023 by Lewin Day 41 Comments

Much of the reporting around climate change focuses on carbon dioxide. It’s public enemy number one when it comes to gases that warm the atmosphere, as a primary byproduct of fossil fuel combustion.

It’s not the only greenhouse gas out there, though. Methane itself is a particularly potent pollutant, and one that is being emitted in altogether excessive amounts. Satellites are now on the hunt for methane emissions in an attempt to save the world from this odorless, colorless gas.

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ChatGPT V. The Legal System: Why Trusting ChatGPT Gets You Sanctioned

May 29, 2023 by Maya Posch 67 Comments

Recently, an amusing anecdote made the news headlines pertaining to the use of ChatGPT by a lawyer. This all started when a Mr. Mata sued the airline where years prior he claims a metal serving cart struck his knee. When the airline filed a motion to dismiss the case on the basis of the statute of limitations, the plaintiff’s lawyer filed a submission in which he argued that the statute of limitations did not apply here due to circumstances established in prior cases, which he cited in the submission.

Unfortunately for the plaintiff’s lawyer, the defendant’s counsel pointed out that none of these cases could be found, leading to the judge requesting the plaintiff’s counsel to submit copies of these purported cases. Although the plaintiff’s counsel complied with this request, the response from the judge (full court order PDF) was a curt and rather irate response, pointing out that none of the cited cases were real, and that the purported case texts were bogus.

The defense that the plaintiff’s counsel appears to lean on is that ChatGPT ‘assisted’ in researching these submissions, and had assured the lawyer – Mr. Schwartz – that all of these cases were real. The lawyers trusted ChatGPT enough to allow it to write an affidavit that they submitted to the court. With Mr. Schwartz likely to be sanctioned for this performance, it should also be noted that this is hardly the first time that ChatGPT and kin have been involved in such mishaps.

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