Archive for the ·

Hardware

· Category...

July 27, 2009 12:33 pm

Apollo 11 Apollo Guidance Computer

no comments
by Martin English    in Hardware,History,Technology

I came across an article on how someone built a copy of the 1964 prototype of the Apollo Guidance Computer (or AGC). It’s hard to compare these, which had a clock speed of 1.024 MHz (that was internal – the external signaling was half that), to modern desktop / laptops with speeds of 2ghz and above (1Ghz is 1,000Mhz is 1,000Khz is 1,000hz).

Going back to something where comparison makes sense, not just in speed, but in memory size, you can look at the IBM PC “XT”, released in 1981. In the cheapest configuration it had 8 times more memory – 16k, vs the 2k used by the final version of the AGC (the AGC also had read-only storage of 32k). The IBM PC XT ran at a clock speed of 4.77MHz (0.00477 GHz, if you want to compare it with your machine). The Apollo’s Guidance Computer ran at less than a quarter of that.

What blows me away is the functionality that NASA got out of the Apollo Guidance Computer. The real-time operating system in the Apollo 11 spacecraft could multi-task up to 8 jobs at a time, something we take entirely for granted today, but a major feat in its time. However, multi-tasking had to be exercised from within the programs – modern operating systems are in control of the execution and can stop any program at any time and hand off some computing power to another. The Apollo Guidance Computer relied on non-preemptive multi-tasking, where programs had to be written so that they relinquish control back to the OS periodically (or nothing else got run)

The Apollo version of the AGC also had a virtual machine which offered more complex instructions, and could be used to perform more advanced mathematics. This was all written within the limitation of 2k of memory and 32k of storage – no external storage whatsoever. Keep in mind that the Apollo 11 was actually the advanced “Block II” version of the AGC, and that earlier missions had relied upon as little as 24k of core read-only storage, and 1k of main memory.

By comparison, the Space Shuttle uses the AP-101 avionics computer which shares its general architecture with the System/360 mainframes, of the 1960′s. It remains in service because it works and is flight-certified, whereas to certify a replacement would cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.

No comment?
February 24, 2009 9:18 am

Alan Kay Computing History Overview

1 comment
by Martin English    in Hardware,History,Technology,software

This is a great historical overview of the computer. Quite long video, but worth watching the first hour, with Alan showing how most ‘modern’ computing ideas had been invented and tested in labs in the 60s. Via the Tekkie Blog.

1 comment...
July 31, 2008 11:02 pm

10 Reasons Enterprises Aren’t Ready to Trust the Cloud

no comments
by Martin English    in Enterprise,Hardware,History,Productivity,Security,Technology,Web / Web 2.0,software

from gigaom…. To summarise,

  1. It’s not secure. Certain companies and industries have to maintain strict watch on their data at all times, either because they’re legally obligated to or because they’re super paranoid.
  2. It can’t be logged, required for compliance purposes.
  3. It’s not platform agnostic. If you need to support multiple platforms, as most enterprises do, then you’re looking at multiple clouds. That can be a nightmare to manage.
  4. Reliability is still an issue. Even inside an enterprise, data centers or servers go down, but generally the communication around such outages is better and in many cases, fail-over options exist.
  5. Portability isn’t seamless. The so-called “cloud” is in fact made of up several clouds, so getting your data from one to another isn’t as easy as IT managers would like. The platform issues (above) can leave data in a format that few or no other cloud accepts, and there are bandwidth costs associated with moving data from one cloud to another.
  6. It’s not environmentally sustainable. As a recent article in The Economist pointed out, the emergence of cloud computing isn’t as ethereal as it might seem. Moving data center operations to the cloud and off corporate balance sheets is kind of like chucking your garbage into a landfill rather than your yard; The problem is still there but you no longer have to look at it.
  7. Cloud computing still has to exist on physical servers. The data still resides on servers somewhere, and the physical location of those servers is important under many nation’s laws. For example, Canada is concerned about its public sector projects being hosted on U.S.-based servers because under the U.S. Patriot Act, it could be accessed by the U.S. government.
  8. The need for speed still reigns at some firms, but data in the cloud means problems with latency inherent in transmitting data across the country or globe.
  9. Large companies already have an internal cloud. Many big firms have internal IT shops that act as a cloud to the multiple divisions under the corporate umbrella. Not only do these internal shops have the benefit of being within company firewalls, but they generally work hard — from a cost perspective — to stay competitive with outside cloud resources, making the case for sending computing to the cloud weak.
  10. Bureaucracy will cause the transition to take longer than building replacement housing in New Orleans. Big companies are conservative, and transitions in computing can take years to implement. A good example is the challenge HP faced when trying to consolidate its data center operations.
No comment?
April 15, 2008 8:29 pm

Custom Hardware Gadgets With BUG

no comments
by Martin English    in Hardware,Technology,Toys

Bug Labs seems to have a very promising concept. The company allows you to order different hardware modules, like a camera, a screen, a touch sensitive device (some still in development) and so on. Then, you can stick these modules onto the base gadget, and via a Java-based programming environment, add your own functionality to the device.

For instance, the site’s directory has an app called GoogleTiles gadget which uses the geographical location its in to then grab a Google Maps tile for display on the LCD module. Another application called FlickrUppr claims to detect motion, then take a snapshot, geotag the snapshot, and upload it to the user’s Flickr account. The PictureFrame gadget turns the bug into a picture frame; the description reads, “Shake it once, then hold it still to take a picture. Shake it again to erase the picture.” The NightRider app on the other hand simply blinks the gadget’s LEDs in Knight Rider pattern…

All this somewhat reminds me of Lego Mindstorm, but for gadgets instead of robots. The gadgets as well as the website look very sleek, though I was slightly hoping they’d also offer something more casual like Python as programming framework. Then again, you can use Jython – Python implemented in Java – to tackle that, as one bug application demonstrates.

No comment?
February 12, 2008 11:36 am

newsflash – X-BOX DRM sucks

no comments
by Martin English    in Hardware,Microsoft,Technology,Toys,software

From CodingHorror

I have nobody to blame but myself, I suppose. DRM sucks, but it’s unavoidable and arguably the future, in the form of ubiquitious consumer devices like the Xbox 360 and iPhone. I’m not asking you to like it. Nobody likes it. But at the very least understand how it works, because as I recently found out, DRM ignorance is expensive

No comment?
February 11, 2008 10:27 am

Submarine cables and Internet Availability

no comments
by Martin English    in Hardware,Technology,Web / Web 2.0,Work

According to reports, the internet blackout, which left 75 million people with only limited access, was caused by a ship that tried to moor off the coast of Egypt in bad weather on Wednesday Jan 30. Both phone and internet traffic was severely reduced across a huge swath of the region, including India, Egypt and Dubai.

image-thumb.png

Despite the clean, hi-tech image of the online world, much of the planet remains totally reliant on real-world connections put in place through massive physical effort. The expensive fibre optic cables are laid at great cost in huge lines around the globe, directing traffic backwards and forwards across continents and streaming millions of conversations simultaneously from one country to another. Here’s a link to another submarine cable map, from Telegepgraphy.com.

No comment?
January 24, 2008 2:30 pm

Disable the speaker beeps on Windows

no comments
by Martin English    in Code,Hardware,Microsoft,Productivity

Aaron Tiensivu has posted the commands you need to know to shut off the Windows speaker beep temporarily or for all time.

To temporarily disable the PC Speaker beep:
net stop beep

To disable the PC Speaker beep for good (until you undo this setting):
sc config beep start= disabled

Now you don’t need to run out of the room screaming next time you make a mistake at the Command Prompt that would normally make the hills come alive with BEEP BEEP BEE BEEEP BEEEEP.

No comment?
January 14, 2008 11:26 am

Australia – Myer loses exclusivity on eeePC

no comments
by Martin English    in Australia,Hardware,Productivity,Toys

ASUS has announced that Myer has lost its exclusive position as the only retailer of the Eee PC in Australia. ASUS will now sell the bargain priced sub-notebook through Betta Electrical, David Jones, Good Guys, Harvey Norman, JB Hi-Fi, Myer, Officeworks, Retravision and WOW Sight & Sound.

For comparison, you can now buy (at time of writing) full featured acer laptops in Australia for less than $600 after cashback, or for the kids, refurbished IBM thinkpads for $350, compared to $499 for the Asus eee pc.

No comment?
January 5, 2008 8:44 pm

Password Recovery using Geforce 8 Video Cards

no comments
by Martin English    in Enterprise,Hardware,Productivity,Security,Technology

The software Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery was designed for distributed recovery of lost passwords by providing hardware acceleration for NTLM password recovery using GeForce 8 video cards which speeds up the process by a factor of up to 25).

The product comes at a price though which is only affordable to companies. I still thought it would be nice to write about it due to its hardware acceleration feature that I never heard about before.

It consists of three components which can act independently from each other: The agent, the server and the console. The server is started at the beginning of the password recovery process. Then a new task is created using the console (on the same or a different computer) and Agents that connect to the server are assigned parts of the work that has to be done.

Agents then report back to the server once their work is done and receive another part until the password is recovered. The Agents post a status message to the server once every 60 seconds.

The server receives its task from the console and distributes it among the agents. The console in its turn is designed to manage the server it is connected to and the agents that are registered on the server. The agents are registered on the server when they connect to it for the first time.

The various passwords that can be recovered include Microsoft Office 2007 and prior documents, PGP, Adobe Acrobate PDF documents, Windows NT, XP, Vista logon passwords, Windows syskey passwords and several other.

No comment?
January 2, 2008 5:20 pm

Turn one PC into two for free

no comments
by Martin English    in *nix,Code,Hardware,Productivity,Security,Technology

How do you like the sound of taking one machine, and having two people logged into it simultaneously? Sounds pretty neat to me – and it’s free too, which is always a tick in the right box.

Canadian company Userful markets Linux-based desktop multiplier and public access computing solutions – effectively turning one system into an X Window server supporting up to ten terminals. They’re giving away a free 2-user copy of their PC Multiplier software, which lets you have two people simultaneously connected to a single system, but running separate sessions.

PC Multiplier uses basic dual-head GPU technology and USB inputs to turn a monitor, keyboard and mouse into a complete workstation. The user has a range of environments to work in, all of which are fully customisable, and more importantly, completely independent of any other environment.

PC Multiplier comes as a set of installable packages for Linux or as a LiveCD for non-Linux systems. It works with most graphics cards supported by X.Org/XFree86 and has been tested on most major distros running the 2.6 kernel, like Fedora Core, SLED, SuSE, Mandriva and Ubuntu (just to name a few).

There’s also a LiveCD available. Like all LiveCDs it doesn’t make any changes to the underlying system, and once it’s up and running individual session performance is pretty good, so it’s suitable for either testing or in a limited production environment.

Actual system requirements are pretty low. For the installed packages, on top of the base resources needed to run the host operating system, PC Multiplier needs a supported dualhead graphics card, 192MB of system memory for a two-user environment (256MB recommended) and an additional 64MB for each extra supported workstation. It has a tiny hard drive footprint of around 13MB and runs on a 400MHz or better CPU. The LiveCD just has the CPU and memory requirements, and can even be run on a system with no physical hard drive.

Within their sessions, users don’t have access to the underlying file system, which means that they have to store data on the network or on USB devices. It’s recommended to link the USB keyboard and mouse for each session to a powered USB hub – this reduces the number of USB ports needed on the host system, but also allows each user to connect a USB storage device which is secured to that session alone.

In short, PC Multiplier is a very clever example of what can be done in the realm of public access computing. The free two user product is a great tool for home users wanting to set up secured environments for kids, or for desktop admins for “proof of concept”. However, to do something really usefull you may need to pay to get more than two users.

A usefull link on Multiple local XFree users under Linux

from APC

No comment?
Older Posts »