Computers & the Internet News and Discussions

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Yuli Ban
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The Internet Is Rotting
Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone
So far, the rise of the web has led to routinely cited sources of information that aren’t part of more formal systems; blog entries or casually placed working papers at some particular web address have no counterparts in the pre-internet era. But surely anything truly worth keeping for the ages would still be published as a book or an article in a scholarly journal, making it accessible to today’s libraries, and preservable in the same way as before? Alas, no.

Because information is so readily placed online, the incentives for creating paper counterparts, and storing them in the traditional ways, declined slowly at first and have since plummeted. Paper copies were once considered originals, with any digital complement being seen as a bonus. But now, both publisher and consumer—and libraries that act in the long term on behalf of their consumer patrons—see digital as the primary vehicle for access, and paper copies are deprecated.

From my vantage point as a law professor, I’ve seen the last people ready to turn out the lights at the end of the party: the law-student editors of academic law journals. One of the more stultifying rites of passage for entering law students is to “subcite,” checking the citations within scholarship in progress to make sure they are in the exacting and byzantine form required by legal-citation standards, and, more directly, to make sure the source itself exists and says what the citing author says it says. (In a somewhat alarming number of instances, it does not, which is a good reason to entertain the subciting exercise.)
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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erowind
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Post by erowind »

Data rot is a major threat to human knowledge and culture. We should have a public copyright-free archive of everything (with credentially locked access to dangerous knowledge like nuclear engineering) that is geographically redundant hundreds if not thousands of times over across all continents. Even the internet archive as wonderful as it is does not meet the bare minimum requirements for what a our civilization needs.

I personally am planning on building an archive to at least act as a modern version of an encyclopedia that can be accessed offline in the moderate future. I don’t have the skills or funding yet but I’m working on it. My archive will be something in between an archive.org mirror and Wikipedia. I intend to target civilization critical data that can be used to rebuild our civilization or otherwise is understand it in the event of collapse scenarios. Among other culturally important knowledge that future archeologists would love like video games and neocities blogs.
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wjfox
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Yuli Ban
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Japan Just Shattered the Internet Speed Record at 319 Terabits per Second
Engineers in Japan just shattered the world record for the fastest internet speed, achieving a data transmission rate of 319 Terabits per second (Tb/s), according to a paper presented at the International Conference on Optical Fiber Communications in June. The new record was made on a line of fibers more than 1,864 miles (3,000 km) long. And, crucially, it is compatible with modern-day cable infrastructure.
This could literally change everything.

The new data transfer method breaks signals up into various wavelengths

Note well: we can't stress enough how fast this transmission speed is. It's nearly double the previous record of 178 Tb/s, which was set in 2020. And it's seven times the speed of the earlier record of 44.2 Tb/s, set with an experimental photonic chip. NASA itself uses a comparatively primitive speed of 400 Gb/s, and the new record soars impossibly high above what ordinary consumers can use (the fastest of which maxes out at 10 Gb/s for home internet connections).
As if there's no limit to this monumental achievement, the record was accomplished with fiber optic infrastructure that already exists (but with a few advanced add-ons). The research team used four "cores", which are glass tubes housed within the fibers that transmit the data, instead of the conventional standard core. The signals are then broken down into several wavelengths sent at the same time, employing a technique known as wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM). To carry more data, the researchers used a rarely-employed third "band", extending the distance via several optical amplification technologies.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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BaobabScion
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Post by BaobabScion »

Yuli Ban wrote: Thu Jul 15, 2021 9:47 pm Japan Just Shattered the Internet Speed Record at 319 Terabits per Second
Engineers in Japan just shattered the world record for the fastest internet speed, achieving a data transmission rate of 319 Terabits per second (Tb/s), according to a paper presented at the International Conference on Optical Fiber Communications in June. The new record was made on a line of fibers more than 1,864 miles (3,000 km) long. And, crucially, it is compatible with modern-day cable infrastructure.
This could literally change everything.

The new data transfer method breaks signals up into various wavelengths

Note well: we can't stress enough how fast this transmission speed is. It's nearly double the previous record of 178 Tb/s, which was set in 2020. And it's seven times the speed of the earlier record of 44.2 Tb/s, set with an experimental photonic chip. NASA itself uses a comparatively primitive speed of 400 Gb/s, and the new record soars impossibly high above what ordinary consumers can use (the fastest of which maxes out at 10 Gb/s for home internet connections).
As if there's no limit to this monumental achievement, the record was accomplished with fiber optic infrastructure that already exists (but with a few advanced add-ons). The research team used four "cores", which are glass tubes housed within the fibers that transmit the data, instead of the conventional standard core. The signals are then broken down into several wavelengths sent at the same time, employing a technique known as wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM). To carry more data, the researchers used a rarely-employed third "band", extending the distance via several optical amplification technologies.
O'Lord, imagine using up the entirety of your yearly internet budget in 1/26th of a second!
weatheriscool
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Flexible 32-bit microprocessor could pave the way to fully flexible smart integrated systems
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-07-fle ... fully.html
by Bob Yirka , Tech Xplore

A team of researchers at ARM Inc., has developed a 32-bit microprocessor on a flexible base which the company claims could pave the way to fully flexible smart integrated systems. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes how they used metal−oxide thin-film transistors along with a type of plastic to create their chip and outline ways they believe it could be used.

Microprocessors power a wide range of products, but what they all have in common is their stiffness. Almost all of them are made using silicon wafers, which means that they have to be hard and flat. This inability to bend, the researchers with this new effort contend, is what is preventing the development of products such as smart clothes, smart labels on foods, packaging and even paper products. To meet that need, the team has created what they describe as the PlasticARM—a RISC-based 32-bit microprocessor set on a flexible base. In addition to its flexibility, the new technique allows for printing a microprocessor onto many types of materials, all at low cost.
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weatheriscool
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AMD’s New 6-Core and 8-Core APUs Are a Bigger Deal Than They Might Seem
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/3 ... might-seem
By Joel Hruska on August 5, 2021 at 10:30 am
This week, AMD launched new desktop silicon for gamers and enthusiasts who want the horsepower of the latest Zen 3 CPU but at a more reasonable price. The 5600G won more accolades in that regard than the 5700G, but both chips are a bigger deal than they might seem — and not just because we’re in the middle of an ongoing GPU shortage.

AMD has been talking about combining CPU and GPU on the same piece of silicon for well over a decade. The company’s entire “APU” concept relies on the idea of CPU and GPU as equal co-processors. AMD took a shot at creating this future when it launched its HSA initiative, but not much ever came of it. AMD had too little market power and its CPUs were not attractive enough to attract much developer attention back in 2012 – 2015. While the GPU could be used, in some cases, to accelerate workloads beyond what the CPU could deliver, only a small amount of software was ever HSA accelerated.
weatheriscool
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Starlink Is Already Getting Close to Wired Broadband Speeds
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/325 ... and-speeds
By Ryan Whitwam on August 6, 2021 at 11:00 am
SpaceX has only been deploying satellites for its Starlink internet service for a couple of years, but it’s already putting traditional satellite internet to shame. According to the latest data from Ookla Speedtest, Starlink has seen substantial speed improvements that put it close to wired broadband. It’s even managed this while increasing subscriber counts by more than 25 percent.

For the uninformed, Starlink is one of several next-gen satellite internet systems. Elon Musk’s outfit is far in the lead thanks to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. This flight-proven vehicle can take 60 Starlink nodes into orbit at a time, and the costs are low thanks to the reusable design. As of now, Starlink has more than 1,600 functional satellites in various orbits, including some that are much lower than traditional satellite internet, which improves speed and latency compared to these solutions.
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caltrek
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The Internet Archive* Has Been Fighting for 25 Years to Keep What’s on the Web From Disappearing
by Kayla Harris, Christina Beis, and Stephanie Shreffler
August 13, 2021

https://theconversation.com/the-interne ... elp-163867

Introduction:
(The Conversation) This year the Internet Archive turns 25. It’s best known for its pioneering role in archiving the internet through the Wayback Machine, which allows users to see how websites looked in the past.

Increasingly, much of daily life is conducted online. School, work, communication with friends and family, as well as news and images, are accessed through a variety of websites. Information that once was printed, physically mailed or kept in photo albums and notebooks may now be available only online. The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed even more interactions to the web.

You may not realize portions of the internet are constantly disappearing. As librarians and archivists, we strengthen collective memory by preserving materials that document the cultural heritage of society, including on the web. You can help us save the internet, too, as a citizen archivist.

Disappearing act

People and organizations remove content from the web for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s a result of changing internet culture, such as the recent shutdown of Yahoo Answers.

It can also be a result of following best practices for website design. When a website is updated, for example, the previous version is overwritten – unless it was archived.
*https://anniversary.archive.org/
Don't mourn, organize.

-Joe Hill
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