Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

From their web site's FAQ:

Is Amiga part of Commodore?
Well, Amiga was a Commodore! Later, at least. But, officially, not yet - though we’d love it to be. And we won't repeat the mistakes of the past relating to that. We’re in open dialogue with the most relevant rights holder to explore a potential reunion, and techno-optimism is in the air. Commodore and Amiga belong together in spirit, and we hope to make that true in practice as well. We're just waiting for them to give the green light and let the fun begin.

The Amiga was an amazing bit of kit. It had true preemptive multi-tasking, not just cooperative multi-tasking. It had a very advanced operating system, far more so than Windows had for many years. And it supported multiple programming languages, as I recall. And currently, has an active user community online, one group is making improvements to the operating system and releasing it!

It also had truly incredible video capabilities. Remember the TV series Babylon 5? ALL of the CGI was rendered on banks of Amigas! The system was called Video Toaster, each rendering machine had 32 MEGABYTES of memory, and it took 45 minutes to render ONE FRAME OF VIDEO!

https://www.generationamiga.com/2020/08/30/how-24-commodore-amiga-2000s-created-babylon-5/

An FPGA version of the Amiga would be absolutely amazing and nuts! It would definitely be a lot more expensive than the C64, which is - let's face it - a fairly basic computer as it was a computer of its era. Kind of like comparing an Apple II and a Mac, apples and oranges - no pun intended. But still, once they get the kinks of the FPGA adaptation worked out, and they now have a lot of experience with those now that they've implemented the C64 on one - again, not that the two computers are comparable in complexity - it should be doable.

Interesting times may lie ahead. It'd be so cool to have a viable third hardware platform, rather than just PC and Mac. I really hope their acquisition and resurrection of the Amiga comes to fruition.

https://www.commodore.net/faq

Well.

What's going on is slightly complicated, and not necessarily a big deal, depending. There are eight flaws found in Brother systems, and they all boil down to one fairly serious vulnerability. A flaw was discovered in how Brother generates the default system administrator password based on the serial number of the printer: if the serial number of the printer is known, you can reverse engineer the password. And here's the problem: if you have not changed that password, THEN you are vulnerable to all sorts of potential mischief! And that's where all the other flaws come into play.

Now, if you changed the default password when you installed your printer, then you're fine. Nothing to worry about. Everything's great. If you didn't, then you need to change it ASAP and patch your printer right now!

This flaw also affects 59 printer models from Fujifilm, Toshiba, Ricoh, and Konica Minolta. I'm assuming they use either Brother engines or the same algorithm for generating admin passwords.

The flaw affects 689 printers, the article provides a link with all of the models listed. Since the default password was built into the printer's read-only memory, it can't be patched. Brother is changing the way they generate the password. But again, if you've changed the default password, you're good. The other flaws are patchable, I don't know if patches are out yet but I'm sure they will be available soon if not already.

https://www.theverge.com/news/694877/brother-printers-security-flaw-password-vulnerability

I've had a high-end gaming laptop for a few years, an Asus Strix. It's a few years old, probably 7 years or so. 32 gig of ram, both SSD and spinning rust drives, 15" screen. Given to me and served me well, but retired when I bought a really powerful PC tower after my dad passed away. The keyboard was in pretty bad shape, I had taken to using an external keyboard before I'd retired it. I'd looked in to what was involved in replacing it, and you basically had to remove absolutely everything from the case. Far more work than I was really eager to embrace.

I decided it needed to get repaired and put back into service, so I got an RMA number and shipped it off to Asus a couple of weeks ago - just to get them to look at it was some $90. I knew it needed a keyboard and battery, as far as I could tell everything else was fine. And early this week I got an estimate that confirmed everything that I suspected. Parts and labor, plus the initial $90~, I was looking at about $500 to get it back into service. Not bad, a lot less than $2500 or so for a comparable new laptop.

Then a couple of nights later I get an email saying that they can't get parts. I don't know if it's the battery or keyboard, but something is not readily available. But it wasn't really bad news - they were offering to swap me for one of two much newer factory refurbished models! They were about two years old, same memory and about the same disk capacity, same screen size. So very comparable.

Well, memory is an issue. Mine definitely has 32 gig, and they're saying it only has 16. But I can buy 64 gig from Crucial and install it myself for about $155 or so. No problem.

But the annoying thing is that the person handling the exchange will only send me one email a night!

I'm not joking!

I receive an email around 7:45pm, it takes me a little time to digest, maybe do a little research, formulate and type my response and send it, and that's it for the night. Maybe I get a response the next night? Or it'll be two nights later? I really don't understand why they're working like this, are they so utterly slammed by repairs that they can only respond once to any given case per night? It doesn't make sense and isn't that great of customer service.

Regardless, hopefully I'm on the way to getting a new(er) laptop in the not distant future! Once I get shipping confirmation, I'll get on to New Egg and order the Crucial memory, and if there's a lag on the memory arrival I'll have time to do some configuration and initial software loading on the new box. Installing the new memory should be no more than 30-60 minutes work.

The legend? The Zilog Z80 CPU.

Talk about a heck of a run! Could you imagine Intel still making Pentium II's today? But that Z80 has kept truckin' along for almost five decades! Talk about an incredible design. While it was a general purpose CPU like those made by Intel and AMD and others today, its low power consumption and well-understood programming and foibles made it very popular for embedded device controllers. I told a friend of mine who thinks he's a tech geek and holds a degree in EE, and he'd never heard of it! He's slightly younger than me, but not that much, he was never a generalist. The Z80 was a backbone for the C/PM and M/PM operating system and S100 bus architecture, which was what computing was done on before in the '70s and '80s until the IBM PC and Mac began revolutionizing and bringing it all to the rest of us.

From the Techspot article: "Federico Faggin, an Intel engineer, founded Zilog in 1974 after his work on the Intel 4004, the first 4-bit CPU. The Zilog Z80 was then released in July 1976, conceived as a software-compatible "extension" and enhancement of the Intel 8080 processor.

Developed by a team of just 12 people, the Z80 saw remarkable success, leading Zilog to establish its own chip manufacturing plants and expand to over a thousand employees within two years. Like its Intel counterpart, the Z80 was originally designed for embedded systems but went on to become a significant milestone in gaming hardware from the 1970s to the mid-1980s."

and

"Several home computers and gaming consoles were built around the capabilities of the Z80, including Sega's Master System and SG-1000, and Nintendo's Game Boy and Game Boy Color. Many classic arcade games also used the Z80, including the original version of Pac-Man. Additionally, the 8-bit processor was common in military applications, musical synthesizers like the Roland Jupiter-8, and various other electronic devices."

So pour one out - but not on! - the Z80.

While the Z80 is going away, its legacy lives on in the eZ80 and newer iterations of the classic chip.

https://www.techspot.com/news/102684-zilog-discontinuing-z80-microprocessor-after-almost-50-years.html

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/04/20/1916203/the-legendary-zilog-z80-cpu-is-being-discontinued-after-nearly-50-years

First up, Western Digital is splitting off its flash memory business.

In 2016, WD - traditionally a hard disk drive maker - purchased flash memory maker SanDisk. SD is known for making USB flash drives and compact flash cards for cameras, smart phones, and other devices. If you look back at 2016, the purchase makes sense: solid state drives were booming, and WD wanted to grow in that direction. But the pandemic utterly disrupted the hard drive and SSD industries and the flash memory side of the business has been suffering.

Now here's the interesting bit. An activist investor started pressuring WD to split off the business, and now they are! Their fortunes will rise and fall as they may, independent from one another. And, I guess, investors will be able to gobble up more stock from each of them?

https://www.reuters.com/technology/western-digital-separate-into-two-companies-2023-10-30/


Apple released their new CPU architecture, the M3 chip. And it has an interesting memory characteristic: it has 25% less memory bandwidth!

There's some curious things going on here, and it's a little too early to know exactly what's up. The chip was just announced yesterday, and the computers are not yet available though they can be ordered now. This is the third ARM M-series chip that Apple has developed in-house and they are screamers. I bought an M2 MacBook Pro earlier this year and am quite happy with it. This M3 chip? It's a bit puzzling. They are comparing the specs of the M3 against the M1, not the M2. And gee whiz, Batman, it's faster than the M1! The numbers would not be nearly as dramatic against the M2.

But the memory numbers are pretty firm: if you have processes that require LOTS of memory access, you may not get the performance out of an M3 system that you would out of an M2. The reason why this limit is in place is unclear, it may have to do with chip limitations or yield. Things will be revealed when actual units ship and are subjected to rigorous testing and labs outside of Apple's purview can get to the bottom of this strangeness.

It's going to be interesting to see what's going on here.

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/10/31/apple-m3-pro-less-memory-bandwidth/

I admit I'm an Apple fan - to a degree. They do a great job of integrating their products, and that is very useful to me. Their hardware is very high-end, but you do pay a direct price for that. They have excellent customer support. And you pay a price for that. And I'm willing to pay that, because I'm sick and tired of having to fix lousy products myself! I've been doing it for too long.

But I also don't like a direction that Apple has taken. They've bound themselves onto this treadmill that ALL of their iPhones have to be refreshed EVERY year. Which means a new iOS EVERY year. They introduce new iPads every year, though that's not a complete line refresh annually. And they introduce new laptops every year, but again, not a top-down refresh. And they do a new MacOS every year.

And in my ever so humble opinion, this is sometimes forcing them to release things before they're truly ready for prime time. The iPhone 15 released a few months ago? Has overheating problems. And if you use wireless induction charging in a BMW or maybe a Toyota, it can zap the NFC chip - Apple says a fix coming later this year. When they released iOS 11 a few years ago, they completely screwed over hearing aid users for pretty much the entire duration of that product release.

The problem is, a lot of the tech industry is ruled by people who live by the mantra 'Move fast and break things' and go back and maybe fix it in the next iteration. I hate seeing products released that haven't been properly tested and have major flaws, just to meet a marketing deadline! Marching to this constant beat of a one year release cycle to match hardware of ever-increasing complexity is a recipe for utter doom.

My iPhone, a 13 Mini, is two hardware generations from the current version. I bought a pair for my wife and I two years ago this coming Christmas. It's running iOS 17, the latest version. But I now believe that it is not truly iOS 17. You see, they time the new iOS release with the new iPhone release, and the new iPhone will ONLY run the latest iOS, can't run the previous generation. I have a feeling that iOS 17.0 is actually iOS 16.9. I think that they're continuing to build on the previous iOS, putting on new shinies and bells and whistles, plus the stuff needed to support the new hardware in the latest generation phone, and then changing the version number to the next increment. At some point they have to fork the operating system (make a copy so maintenance engineers can make patches (fixes) for problems in the aging code base) so that the engineers working on next year's phone can get the operating system working for the newer hardware, which is software-disabled for the old phones since that hardware doesn't exist on an iPhone 13 even though iOS 18 will need to run on it.

Software development for things like this must really suck be really challenging, and I am so glad that I was never involved in it! I wrote business systems for government agencies to support populations in need, and I'm proud of what I did because it helped people. This stuff? Far beyond my ability, that's for sure. Completely different type of programming.

It was noticed that Barracuda Email Security Gateways (ESGs) were spewing forth a lot of malware. And Barracuda says the devices CANNOT BE PATCHED AND MUST BE DECOMMISIONED AND REMOVED FROM SERVICE.

A little technical lesson. Company/corporate networks have a single point of contact (for the sake of discussion) with the internet. At this point there is a firewall, which is a security device that scans all traffic coming in for attacks and going out for attempts to exfiltrate corporate secrets (well, at big companies they look for exfiltration attempts). There are also ESGs which try to block attempts from bag guys to send malware through corrupted email attachments and again, prevent exfiltration of corporate secrets through sending out cost sheets through email, etc.

Somehow bad guys have compromised Barracuda's ESG to such a level that they have no confidence that this malware can be removed! Now things get interesting. If you read the Krebs article linked below, one security professional believes this is the work of a 'State Actor', meaning a nation. Common computer criminals want fast results, and have the software exploits to get those results. State actors want long-term results without detection. This malware has been in place since OCTOBER OF LAST YEAR.

I've previously posted about the UEFI hack where an exploit goes into the boot system of a computer. Well, an ESG is a computer, though not a general purpose computer like I'm writing on or you're reading this with. But it has a boot system and a CPU and it's programmable, it's just programmed to do a specific task and it's updateable. Thing is, it probably uses bog-standard CPUs since it's easy to find engineers who know how to write code for them, even if the code is quite specialized - these things don't run Windows! But they do have a CPU and they do have to boot up, so there's an opportunity to exploit, and someone found a way.

Now, here's my thought. The Krebs article says that there are 11,000 of Barracuda's ESG devices in use right now. If I am an IT manager, and I have one or more of these devices in use, and I'm suddenly told that I have to replace ALL of them RIGHT NOW, is Barracuda going to be my automatic first choice for another ESG? They just cost me a LOT of money, and caused me a lot of trouble because guaranteed most of the people are going to be caught having to replace this gear outside of their scheduled replacement cycle (when corps can, things like this are budgeted and scheduled on approx a 3-5 year replacement cycle).

This is really going to hurt Barracuda's long-term financials. It wouldn't surprise me if they take a serious dive and are gobbled up by Cisco or someone else within the next 3-5 years.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/06/barracuda-urges-replacing-not-patching-its-email-security-gateways/

WOW. WD did a bunch of new product announcements yesterday, these were perhaps the biggies.

From the article: "The 26TB Ultrastar DC HC670 drives use tech called shingled magnetic recording, or SMR, to boost the amount of data that can fit on each platter, at the expense of performance." Interesting. I was unaware of this SMR tech. Cool stuff!

An article on Ars from late January said that Seagate and WD drives in the 20 TB area ran around $600. I've always wanted a wireless SAN in my house for near backup and storage, one of these mirrored to a second would be perfectly adequate at a fairly low cost.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/05/western-digital-announces-26tb-hard-drives-and-15tb-server-ssds/

Completely SFW. Honestly! Would I lie to you, baby? :-)
( Read more... )

A rather newer one, a 2015 with a Retina display, as a matter of fact! My plan was to buy a 2012 MBP since it could be serviced, and that was going to run $600-800, so this will be quite a savings.

One slight problem: the battery is bulging, and it's quite a PITB to replace, so that's going to be a chunk of change to replace. That's why I'm getting it: he replaced it with a new Air, and knew that my MBP blew up last year, and knew I'd benefit from it.

In two weeks we'll be in Phoenix and our trip to Europe begins! I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to this!

I had two concerns. First, I didn't want to take my laptop, a MacBook Air. Yes, it's light. But it's a lot more power than I really needed for this trip, and it's valuable.

So I bought an Asus Chromebook. $200 from Amazon for 4 gig of memory and 16 gig of storage, plus I have a spare 16 gig MicroSD card sitting around that is loading up with books even as we speak.

I have a specific list of tasks for the Chromebook: long battery life (it's obscene -- 10-13 hours!), light document/spreadsheet editing (I want to work on/revise two game designs while I'm traveling), copying photos nightly to flash drives in case of theft or equipment failure, and reading material for the trans-Atlantic flights, which the battery life and plethora of epubs that are copying right now will provide.

I hesitate to say that the Chromebook is NOT a laptop. It has a full-size keyboard, I opted for the just under 12" screen, it has ports for USB, HDMI, MicroSD, it has cameras and sound. No, it doesn't have much storage, just under 10 gig available. But when you think about the laptops that we had just ten years ago that might have 300-500 MEG of storage available, I think it's survivable.

The limitation is that you're initially bound to the Chrome OS from Google, something that evolved from Unix/Linux and their Android phone/tablet OS. Your apps are limited to what's available on the Google Play store, and there's a box that you can check to note that they can work offline.

This is an important thing to keep in mind -- if you want to use it effectively while away from WiFi, say, on a trans-Atlantic flight, you need to make sure your data and apps are on the system and not in Google's cloud.

I am quite impressed by its capability. The keyboard has a very good feel, the trackpad is very responsive and responds to taps -- it doesn't have to be pushed down to click, the display is very bright and hi-res. I wish the keyboard had backlighting like my Air does, but for $200 that's too much to expect.

Aside from the application issue and the minor point of keyboard lights, I currently have two complaints. First, the keyboard mapping is similar to OS-X mapping, but not identical. Neither is it like Windows mapping. And the limited instructions and on-screen tutorial don't tell you what the functions are. So you'll end up scrounging around online trying to find out how to use it. Second, and related to the first, is the OS is not 'out of the box intuitive' to use. I've puzzled out a few things, but I really wish the provided onscreen tutorial had taught me more.

Oh, and here's a neat part: you can install Ubuntu on it! I'm not going to mess with that before the trip, but I might in a month when we get back. Two of my friends have done that and are very happy.

This is quite an awesome device. And for $200, though I don't want to think of it as disposable, if someone steals it or it gets broken, I'm not going to cry too hard. There's a model for $170/180 with 2 gig of memory and 16 gig of storage, I figured the price difference for 4 gig was trivial and got the additional memory.

AND MAN, IS IT LIGHT! This thing is lighter than my wife's iPad 2! It's definitely lighter than my Air: this thing weighs 2 lbs 6 ounces! My iPad Mini weighs 1 lb 5 oz. It's pretty scary light. And small. It's going to make my backpack much more bearable shlepping through airports in 2 weeks!


And now, I'm off to Three Rivers Petroglyphs site to continue familiarizing myself with my new camera and give it a good workout, which I'll post about tonight or tomorrow!