Category Archives: Computers

Miscellanious Computing

Google to acquire Motorola Mobility (Updated x1)

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Very interesting news, especially given Motorola’s recent sabre rattling about going after patent victims^W income – hopefully this will put the end to that nonsense.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. & LIBERTYVILLE, Ill. – Aug. 15, 2011 – Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Motorola Mobility Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: MMI) today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Google will acquire Motorola Mobility for $40.00 per share in cash, or a total of about $12.5 billion, a premium of 63% to the closing price of Motorola Mobility shares on Friday, August 12, 2011. The transaction was unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both companies.

The acquisition of Motorola Mobility, a dedicated Android partner, will enable Google to supercharge the Android ecosystem and will enhance competition in mobile computing. Motorola Mobility will remain a licensee of Android and Android will remain open. Google will run Motorola Mobility as a separate business.

I hope with Google in control we’ll see some better Android devices out there – can we get a real keyboard please ?!?

Update 1:

It appears that patents are part of the reason for Google buying Motorola, but looks like they’re being trailed as defensive according to this TechCrunch article:

During today’s conference call explaining the deal, Page noted that Motorola’s “strong patent portfolio” will help Google defend Android against “Microsoft, Apple, and other companies.” The first two questions on the call went right to the patent issue as well. With Android under attack on the patent front by Apple, Microsoft, Oracle and others, buying Motorola is very much a defensive move as well.

Comment on Social Media and Social Unrest

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My good friend Alec Muffett has written on ComputerworldUK about a discussion on the pros and cons of social media in light of the riots in the UK. He puts it really well:

I support that some people might want to use Blackberries to organise riots. If people want to use a cellphone or social media to conspire, that’s fine by me. I also believe that young lovers should be able to whisper sweet nothings to each other in secret, I believe that rape victims should be able to communicate in private, and that pregnant girls should be able to seek abortion advice without state, corporate, or parental eavesdropping. Cancer sufferers should be able to share in private their illness with the people who care for them, and I believe that dissidents should be free to communicate political opinion.

I believe all of these things because I discriminate the ability to obtain privacy from the exercise of criminal intent, and I believe that the ability to have a private conversation – something that 200 years ago was easily guaranteed – is a valuable asset to the individual. Plus I further believe that a state which has been too lazy, too profligate, or too cheap to police what people are doing rather than how they talk about doing it, is in no position to argue that ability or secrecy of communication should be inhibited because the problem is too expensive for them to address otherwise.

This is even more appropriate these days given that David Cameron, the UK PM, has now said:

We are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it will be right to stop people from communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.

I guess because it worked so well in Tunisia, Egypt, etc…

I would also suggest you watch his video “On Cyberspace, Social Media and Censorship“, recorded before the UK unrest.

GNU/Linux based phones – sic transit gloria mundi

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So it’s looking like there’s going to be a real dearth of “real” GNU/Linux based phones from now on, with the Nokia N9 likely to be the last that I can see for some time. For a while it was looking quite promising with the whole Meego idea, but Nokia’s new CEO from Microsoft seems to have put paid to that with their colours now tied to the sinking mast of Windows Mobile. On the Meego handset list changes to how bugzilla items relating to the handset CE were announced, with the disappointing message that:

Handset UX isn’t fully maintained and currently there’s no activities for 1.3. N900 CE project is only who is maintaining / developing anything to Handset UX and when bugs are fixed in CE the fixes are also available to add to the MeeGo release.

There has been some activity from Nokia contributing back some work done on Meego (in general) for the N9, but basically it appears there’s no interest in Meego phones from anyone other than the N900 community. 🙁

That means that for now we’re stuck with either pseudo-open Android/Linux phones (which, I’ve got to say, haven’t really impressed me too much so far) and Apple’s iPhone which I dislike for its extreme walled garden approach (and I’ve even less idea about usability than Android).

I guess what I’m missing is the power of having a real Linux distro (a shell and utilities that you expect with it) on a phone. I’ve been really happy with my N900 – the fact that I can ssh to our HPC clusters and use X forwarding to fire apps back to it has been really useful at times (not to mention vendor provided root access) – and I was struck that the Meego handset UX has full bash and (amazingly) even strace installed by default. Something approaching a real computer.

But then again I’m a niche market that makes most niche markets look positively huge, but having tasted freedom with the OpenMoko and the N900 I’m hungry for more..

Great Terms & Conditions

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Wonderful fake T&C’s for a fake password checker (well, intended to reinforce that you should never use them).. For example:

You may terminate your relationship to Estatis Inc. by burning all of your possessions and accomplishing applicable purification rites. In this event, you agree that an Estatis Inc. Retaliatory Creature shall be summoned to allow Estatis Inc. to retain full ownership of your soul. In the unforeseen event of you defeating the Estatis Inc. Retaliatory Creature, you shall be released from any obligations arising from your use of the Estatis Free Password Security Checker for the rest of your mortal life, notwithstanding any claims to your soul in Heaven, Hell, the Netherworld or any places with similar legal status. Additional information can be provided by your personal deity or deities (if any).

There’s some other fun stuff in there..

Microsoft Patents “Legal Intercept” of VoIP and other Network Protocols

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In 2009 some bright sparks at Microsoft decided that they should patent how to legally intercept VoIP (explicitly SIP traffic in the patent) and other network protocols. The SIP attack basically boils down to tweaking the SDP packets to remove an option:

If SIP invite messages are intercepted on their way to the call server or in the call server then the “a=candidate” lines referring to a direct peer to peer voice connection may be removed from the SDP parameters. As a result, the terminating call VoIP entity is not offered local paths and will not respond with them in the answer SDP. This forces the call through the NAT and into the public network where it can be transparently recorded.

But of course this is a patent and so the broad principles are couched in heaps of legal mumbo-jumbo and so what is actually covered is impenetrable.

One interesting point, given recent developments, is:

For example, VoIP may include audio messages transmitted via gaming systems, instant messaging protocols that transmit audio, Skype and Skype-like applications, meeting software, video conferencing software, and the like.

This is long before they bought Skype, but I’m sure that won’t stop conspiracy theorists.. 🙂

Japan knocks China off the #1 spot of the Top500 by 3X – a GRAPE machine ?

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According to the NYT the new Top500 list (due out in the next few hours) will list the Japanese ‘K’ machine at the #1 spot of the Top500 at 8.2 PF.

The computer, known as “K Computer”, is three times faster than a Chinese rival that previously held the top position, said Jack Dongarra, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville who keeps the official rankings of computer performance.
[…]
K is made up of 672 cabinets filled with system boards. Although considered energy-efficient, it still uses enough electricity to power nearly 10,000 homes at a cost of around $10 million annually, Mr. Dongarra said.

The research lab that houses K plans to increase the computer?s size to 800 cabinets. That will raise its speed, which already exceeds that of its five closest competitors combined, Mr. Dongarra said.

The excellent @HPC_Guru on Twitter said:

K Supercomputer Technical details: 80k+ SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs, 640K+ cores, 1PB+ RAM, 6-dimensional Mesh/Torus interconnect

But I have a reliable source who claims that this is using GRAPE cards as APUs to reach its performance without causing (another) meltdown in Japan..

The press release for the new Top500 says:

Unlike the Chinese system it displaced from the No. 1 slot and other recent very large system, the K Computer does not use graphics processors or other accelerators.

New open source compiler on the way

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Some interesting news overnight, the company PathScale have announced their EKOPath4 compiler will be released under open source licenses:

PathScale announced today that the EKOPath 4 Compiler Suite is now available as an open source project and free download for Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris. This release includes documentation and the complete development stack, including compiler, debugger, assembler, runtimes and standard libraries. EKOPath is the product of years of ongoing development, representing one of the industries highest performance Intel 64 and AMD C, C++ and Fortran compilers.

This is the compiler that, when first launched, the company said that if another compiler generated faster code then you should submit a bug report to get it fixed. 🙂

In conversation on the Beowulf list I asked about the licenses and the code and their CTO replied, saying:

Main compiler is GPLv3, v2+ and LGPL – Other parts are a mix of permissive licenses.

and that the code itself was going to be available from the PathScale GitHub account, alongside their existing open source projects.

SOLVED: Modern kernels fail to boot on old quad processor Pentium Pro server (Updated x3)

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I’ve got an ancient Olivetti Netstrada, a deskside server system with quad Pentium Pro 200MHz processors, 256MB RAM, dual power supplies and five 4GB SCSI drives.

It’s been running Ubuntu 8.04 for ages and I found that with my partitioning layout (set up for testing ZFS-fuse ages ago) I couldn’t upgrade it without major surgery so I decided I’d just put Debian on it instead. That’s where I hit problems..

  1. Debian/kfreebsd (Squeeze & daily) – kernel panics very early with panic: vm_fault: fault on nofault entry, addr: c3925000.
  2. Debian/Linux Squeeze – CD boot loader hangs before getting to menu
  3. Debian Lenny – install kernel panics when uncompressing the initramfs, claims it’s out of memory.

Fortunately the Debian Etch install CD boots and installs correctly, only problem is that Etch is now archived and there are no updates for it..

I dist-upgraded to Lenny and found that the latest kernel there still panics on boot, but the user space is OK. Then I went to Squeeze and found that yes, the Squeeze kernel hangs very early, just after saying it was booting the kernel after uncompressing. Unfortunately the udev in Squeeze won’t work with the Etch kernel, but all that’s broken so far is bringing up the network interface and I can do that by hand with dhclient eth0. Oh, and grub2 hangs (which I suspect is the same issue as the install CD).

I’ve tried building my own kernel using 2.6.38.3 starting with an “allnoconfig” to disable everything and only turn on the minimum necessary, but that has the same behaviour as the 2.6.32 kernel that is in Squeeze, the last thing printed to the console is:

Booting the kernel.

which is at the end of the decompress_kernel() function in arch/x86/boot/compressed/misc.c.

Does anyone have any ideas before I go and throw myself on the tender mercies of the LKML ?

Update: Both Alan Cox and Ingo Molnar suggested using the earlyprintk=vga option which I’d not stumbled across before, that revealed that the 2.6.39-rc4 kernel is misdetecting LOWMEM as 16MB not 256MB which could explain a lot. It also reminded me that I’d seen this before and had an offlist conversation with H. Peter Anvin about it in 2008 which tailed off due to work pressures on his part.

Update 2: Thanks to Thomas Meyer and H. Peter Anvin it’s now known what happened – the commit message from hpa for Thomas’s patch describes it best:

When we use BIOS function e801 to probe memory, we should use ax/bx (or cx/dx) as a pair, not mix and match. This was a typo during the translation from assembly code, and breaks at least one set of machines in the field (which return cx = dx = 0).

The patch has been accepted by Linus and will be in 2.6.39!

Update 3: The patch is in 2.6.39-rc6 and that now successfully boots all the way to userspace with the kernel parameters “noapic scsi_mod.scan=sync”! Hooray!

Google Video Closing Down

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Watching some random videos on Google Video I saw that they all had at the top:

This video will be removed on April 29, 2011. Learn more.

That says that “On April 29, 2011 videos that have been uploaded to Google Video will no longer be available for playback“, the people who uploaded them can download them (in FLV format only) to be uploaded elsewhere, but that’s all folks. Confirmation comes from this blog post which posts the (translated) text of an email from Google to Google Video uploaders:

Later this month, hosted video content on Google Video will no longer be available for playback. Google Video stopped taking uploads in May 2009 and now we’re removing the remaining hosted content. […] On April 29, 2011, videos that have been uploaded to Google Video will no longer be available for playback. We’ve added a Download button to the video status page, so you can download any video content you want to save. If you don’t want to download your content, you don’t need to do anything. (The Download feature will be disabled after May 13, 2011.)

Sadly this means that Google have gone back on the promise from 2009 when they turned off uploads, saying:

Will all of the videos in my Google Video account be deleted?
No. The videos that are already in your account will remain hosted by Google Video. You will still have access to all the existing management tools for them.

So if you’ve got content there, go grab it before it goes away!