The First Gui? Volscan Controls The Air

March 9, 2023 by Al Williams 10 Comments

In the 1950s, computers were, for the most part, ponderous machines. But one machine offered a glimpse of the future. The Volscan was probably the first real air traffic computer designed to handle high volumes of military aircraft operations. It used a light gun that looked more like a soldering gun than a computer input device. There isn’t much data about Volscan, but it appears to have been before its time, and had arguably the first GUI on a computer system ever.

The Air Force had a problem. The new — in the 1950s — jets needed long landing approaches and timely landings since they burned more fuel at lower altitudes. According to the Air Force, they could land 40 planes in an hour, but they needed to be able to do 120 planes an hour. The Whirlwind computer had proven that computers could process radar data — although Whirlwind was getting the data over phone lines from a distance. So the Air Force’s Cambridge Research Center started working on a computerized system to land planes called Volscan, later known as AN/GSN-3.

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Will A.I. Steal All The Code And Take All The Jobs?

March 8, 2023 by Joseph Long 59 Comments

New technology often brings with it a bit of controversy. When considering stem cell therapies, self-driving cars, genetically modified organisms, or nuclear power plants, fears and concerns come to mind as much as, if not more than, excitement and hope for a brighter tomorrow. New technologies force us to evolve perspectives and establish new policies in hopes that we can maximize the benefits and minimize the risks. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is certainly no exception. The stakes, including our very position as Earth’s apex intellect, seem exceedingly weighty. Mathematician Irving Good’s oft-quoted wisdom that the “first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need make” describes a sword that cuts both ways. It is not entirely unreasonable to fear that the last invention we need to make might just be the last invention that we get to make.

Artificial Intelligence and Learning

Artificial intelligence is currently the hottest topic in technology. AI systems are being tasked to write prose, make art, chat, and generate code. Setting aside the horrifying notion of an AI programming or reprogramming itself, what does it mean for an AI to generate code? It should be obvious that an AI is not just a normal program whose code was written to spit out any and all other programs. Such a program would need to have all programs inside itself. Instead, an AI learns from being trained. How it is trained is raising some interesting questions.

Humans learn by reading, studying, and practicing. We learn by training our minds with collected input from the world around us. Similarly, AI and machine learning (ML) models learn through training. They must be provided with examples from which to learn. The examples that we provide to an AI are referred to as the data corpus of the training process. The robot Johnny 5 from “Short Circuit”, like any curious-minded student, needs input, more input, and more input.

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The Future Of RISC-V And The VisionFive 2 Single Board Computer

March 6, 2023 by Jonathan Bennett 47 Comments

We’ve been following the open, royalty-free RISC-V ISA for a while. At first we read the specs, and then we saw RISC-V cores in microcontrollers, but now there’s a new board that offers enough processing power at a low enough price point to really be interesting in a single board computer. The VisionFive 2 ran a successful Kickstarter back in September 2022, and I’ve finally received a unit with 8 GB of ram. And it works! The JH7110 won’t outperform a modern desktop, or even a Raspberry Pi 4, but it’s good enough to run a desktop environment, browse the web, and test software.

And that’s sort of a big deal, because the RISC-V architecture is starting to show up in lots of places. The challenge has been getting real hardware that’s powerful enough to run Linux and compile software on, that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. If ARM is an alternative architecture, then RISC-V is still an experimental one, and that is an issue when trying to use the VF2. That’s a theme we’ll repeat a few times, but the thing to remember here is that getting more devices in the wild is the first step to fixing things. Continue reading “The Future Of RISC-V And The VisionFive 2 Single Board Computer” →

How Hard Could It Be To Get Millions Of Phone Bills Right?

March 2, 2023 by Dan Maloney 46 Comments

It may be a foreign concept to anyone who has never paid a dime for a phone call over and above the monthly service charge, but phone calls were once very, VERY expensive — especially long-distance calls, which the phone company ungenerously defined as anything more than a few towns away. Woe betide the 70s teen trying to talk to out-of-town friends or carry on a romance with anyone but the guy or girl next door when that monthly phone bill came around; did anyone else try to intercept it from the mailbox before the parents could see it?

While it seems somewhat quaint now, being charged for phone calls was not only a big deal to the customers, but to the phone company itself. The Bell System, which would quickly become a multi-billion dollar enterprise, was built on the ability to accurately meter the use of their service and charge customers accordingly. Like any engineered system, it grew and changed over time, and it had to adapt to the technologies and economic forces at the time.

One of the most interesting phases of its development was the development of Automatic Message Accounting (AMA), which in a very real way paved the way for the wide-open, worldwide, too-cheap-to-meter phone service we enjoy today.

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FOSDEM 2023: An Open-Source Conference, Literally

March 1, 2023 by Arya Voronova 6 Comments

Every year, on the first weekend of February, a certain Brussels university campus livens up. There, you will find enthusiasts of open-source software and hardware alike, arriving from different corners of the world to meet up, talk, and listen. The reason they all meet there is the conference called FOSDEM, a long-standing open-source software conference which has been happening in Belgium since 2000. I’d like to tell you about FOSDEM because, when it comes to conferences, FOSDEM is one of a kind.

FOSDEM is organized in alignment with open-source principles, which is to say, it reminds me of an open-source project itself. The conference is volunteer-driven, with a core of staff responsible for crucial tasks – yet, everyone can and is encouraged to contribute. Just like a large open-source effort, it’s supported by university and company contributions, but there’s no admission fees for participants – for a conference, this means you don’t have to buy a ticket to attend. Last but definitely not least, what makes FOSDEM shine is the community that it creates.

FOSDEM’s focus is open software – yet, for hackers of the hardware world, you will find a strong hardware component to participate in, since a great number of FOSDEM visitors are either interested in hardware, or even develop hardware-related things day-to-day. It’s not just that our hardware can’t live without software, and vice-versa – here, you will meet plenty of pure software, a decent amount of pure hardware, and a lot of places where the two worlds are hard to distinguish. All in all, FOSDEM is no doubt part of hacker culture in Europe, and today, I will tell you about my experience of FOSDEM 2023. Continue reading “FOSDEM 2023: An Open-Source Conference, Literally” →

Repurposing Old Smartphones: When Reusing Makes More Sense Than Recycling

February 28, 2023 by Maya Posch 89 Comments

When looking at the specifications of smartphones that have been released over the past years, it’s remarkable to see how aspects like CPU cores, clockspeeds and GPU performance have improved during this time, with even new budget smartphones offering a lot of computing power, as well as a smattering of sensors. Perhaps even more remarkable is that of the approximately 1.5 billion smartphones sold each year, many will be discarded again after a mere two years of use. This seems rather wasteful, and a recent paper by Jennifer Switzer and colleagues proposes that a so-called Computational Carbon Intensity (CCI) metric should be used to determine when it makes more sense to recycle a device than to keep using it.

What complicates the decision of when it makes more sense to reuse than recycle is that there are many ways to define when a device is no longer ‘fit for purpose’. It could be argued that the average smartphone is still more than good enough after two years to be continued as a smartphone for another few years at least, or at least until the manufacturer stops supplying updates. Beyond the use as a smartphone, they’re still devices with a screen, WiFi connection and a capable processor, which should make it suitable for a myriad of roles.

Unfortunately, as we have seen with the disaster that was Samsung’s ‘upcycling’ concept a few years ago, or Google’s defunct Project Ara, as promising as the whole idea of ‘reuse, upcycle, recycle’ sounds, establishing an industry standard here is frustratingly complicated. Worse, over the years smartphones have become ever more sealed-up, glued-together devices that complicate the ‘reuse’ narrative.

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Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One Where Shift (Really) Happens

February 23, 2023 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

Hooray, the system works! [Sasha K.] wrote to let me know about their Thumbs Up! keyboard, which is the culmination of a long journey down the DIY rabbit hole to end game. (Seriously, it’s kind of a wild ride, and there’s a ton of pictures).

Thumbs Up! comes in both monoblock and full split versions, but both are designed for Kailh chocs. Fans of the Kinesis Advantage will dig the key wells and possibly the thumb cluster, which in this case is raised up a bit from the mainlands. I’m pretty fond of the naked PCB approach to keyboard building, especially when they’re stacked and look as good as these do.

While the full split only comes in RP2040 (not that there’s anything wrong with that), the monoblock split is available in Pro Micro, ATmega Mini, and RP2040 versions. You can find the STL for the tilt stand and other goodies on Thingiverse.

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