Monthly Archives: December 2023

Article note: Oh look, Broadcom, having just received regulatory approval to do so, has decided to squeeze their inherited VMWare customers hard enough that they'll hopefully fund open-source virtualization tooling so they can't get locked in again.

Article note: Huh. Apple who are even more locked in and locked down got away with theirs, but Google's visible collaboration with suppliers lost.

Article note: ... I ignored the first version of this story I saw because I assumed CAMM was about frequently talked about but rarely delivering "Content Addressable Memory" not "Compression Attached Memory." Overloaded acronym. I see why vendors would like it now that I see a picture; it's thinner than SODIMM sockets and is a full-replacement-only upgrade. Widespread adoption would at least be an improvement to soldered-in RAM.

Enlarge / The front of a 128GB Dell CAMM. (credit: Dell)

Move over, SO-DIMM. A new type of memory module has been made official, and backers like Dell are hoping that it eventually replaces SO-DIMM (small outline dual in-line memory module) entirely.

This month, JEDEC, a semiconductor engineering trade organization, announced that it had published the JESD318: Compression Attached Memory Module (CAMM2) standard, as spotted by Tom's Hardware.

CAMM2 was originally introduced as CAMM via Dell, which has been pushing for standardization since it announced the technology at CES 2022. Dell released the only laptops with CAMM in 2022, the Dell Precision 7670 and 7770 workstations.

Article note: That's charmingly circular. They're investing in their own market driver.

Article note: That's charmingly circular. They're investing in their own market driver.

Article note: The thing I like about cowgol and a bunch of the related projects is they're headed toward self-hosting environments. Simple self-hosting computers are - intellectually speaking - important for learning to reason about systems, and almost an extinct species except for actually historical systems.

Article note: That is a supremely weird artifact. It was a set of libraries that ran on Windows 3.1 (or later 95) and used winmem32.dll to touch real memory, which provided (most of) the interfaces to run 386 a.out BSD binaries and a unix userland. From right in the 386BSD/BSDi Lawsuit 4.3BSD era, sort of before Linux and after Coherent or Xenix as low-cost x86 unix options.

Article note: They're getting close to understanding the stack well enough to run the ESP32 radios blob-less with all open source code. Not quite there, but it's really exciting progress, the blob has always been a little concerning on an otherwise nice and open platform.

Article note: Oh dang, I've tried it but thought RDT was diminishing-returns hipster voodoo. Apparently the science proves out, and the lesser static even measurably helps extraction.

Scientific inspiration can strike at any time. For Christopher Hendon, a computational materials chemist at the University of Oregon, inspiration struck at a local coffee bar where his lab holds regular coffee hours for the Eugene campus community—a fitting venue since Hendon's research specialties include investigating the scientific principles behind really good coffee. The regulars included two volcanologists, Josef Dufek and Joshua Méndez Harper, who noted striking similarities between the science of coffee and plumes of volcanic ash, magma, and water. Thus, an unusual collaboration was born.

“It’s sort of like the start of a joke—a volcanologist and a coffee expert walk into a bar and then come out with a paper,” said Méndez Harper, a volcanologist at Portland State University. “But I think there are a lot more opportunities for this sort of collaboration, and there’s a lot more to know about how coffee breaks, how it flows as particles, and how it interacts with water. These investigations may help resolve parallel issues in geophysics—whether it’s landslides, volcanic eruptions, or how water percolates through soil.”

The result is a new paper published in the journal Matter demonstrating how adding a single squirt of water to coffee beans before grinding can significantly reduce the static electric charge on the resulting grounds. This, in turn, reduces clumping during brewing, yielding less waste and the strong, consistent flow needed to produce a tasty cup of espresso. Good baristas already employ the water trick; it's known as the Ross droplet technique, per Hendon. But this is the first time scientists have rigorously tested that well-known hack and measured the actual charge on different types of coffee.

Article note: ...Some high schooler reverse engineered the iMessage protocol suite and these folks are making an interoperable product out of it. It should be legally protected (reverse engineering for compatibility), but no doubt Apple is going to fuck with them. Honestly, there are protocols worse than iMessage, it'd be nice if it was an open standard, getting back to widely-used chat platforms that are interoperable instead of vendor lock-in jails is really the social value.

Enlarge / A Pixel 3, messaging a savvy iPhone owner, one with the kinds of concerns Beeper hopes to resolve for its customers. (credit: Kevin Purdy)

In the past week, I have sent an iMessage to one friend from a command-line Python app and to another from a Pixel 3 Android phone.

Sending an iMessage without an Apple device isn't entirely new, but this way of doing it is. I didn't hand over my Apple credentials or log in with my Apple ID on a Mac server on some far-away rack. I put my primary SIM card in the Pixel, I installed Beeper Mini, and it sent a text message to register my number with Apple. I never gave Beeper Mini my Apple ID.

From then on, my iPhone-toting friends who sent messages to my Pixel 3 saw them as other-iPhone blue, not noticeably distracting green. We could all access the typing, delivered/read receipts, emoji reactions, and most other iPhone-to-iPhone message features. Even if I had no active Apple devices, it seems, I could have chosen to meet Apple users where they were and gain end-to-end encryption by doing so.