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Raspberry Pi Is Planning a London IPO, But Its CEO Expects 'No Change' In Focus
by Peter Reutemann 31 Jan '24

31 Jan '24

'Ars Technica: The business arm of Raspberry Pi is preparing to make an initial public offering (IPO) in London. CEO Eben Upton tells Ars that should the IPO happen, it will let Raspberry Pi's not-for-profit side expand by "at least a factor of 2X." And while it's "an understandable thing" that Raspberry Pi enthusiasts could be concerned, "while I'm involved in running the thing, I don't expect people to see any change in how we do things." CEO Eben Upton confirmed in an interview with Bloomberg News that Raspberry Pi had appointed bankers at London firms Peel Hunt and Jefferies to prepare for "when the IPO market reopens." Raspberry previously raised money from Sony and semiconductor and software design firm ARM, and it sought public investment. Upton denied or didn't quite deny IPO rumors in 2021, and Bloomberg reported Raspberry Pi was considering an IPO in early 2022. After ARM took a minority stake in the company in November 2023, Raspberry Pi was valued at roughly 400 million pounds, or just over $500 million. Given the company's gradual recovery from pandemic supply chain shortages, and the success of the Raspberry Pi 5 launch, the company's IPO will likely jump above that level, even with a listing in the UK rather than the more typical US IPO. Upton told The Register that "the business is in a much better place than it was last time we looked at it [an IPO]. We partly stopped because the markets got bad. And we partly stopped because our business became unpredictable." "It's a good thing, in that people care about us," Upton said in response to concerned hobbyists and tech enthusiasts. "What Raspberry Pi [builds] are the products we want to buy, and then we sell them to people like us," Upton said. "Certainly, while I'm involved in it, I can't imagine an environment in which the hobbyists are not going to be incredibly important." The IPO is "about the foundation," Upton said, with that charitable arm selling some of its majority stake in the business entity to raise funds and expand. "We've not cooked up some new way for a not-for-profit to do an IPO, no," he noted. [He told Ars that Raspberry Pi's business arm has had both strategic and private investors in its history, along with a majority shareholder in its Foundation (which in 2016 owned 75 percent of shares), and that he doesn't see changes to what Pi has built. He also noted that the foundation was previously funded by dividends from the business side.] "We do this transaction, and the proceeds of that transaction allow the foundation to train teachers, run clubs, expand programs, and ... do those things at, at least, a factor of 2X. That's what I'm most excited about." Upton said there would be "no change" to the kinds of products Pi makes, and that makers are "culturally important to us." [...] "If people think that an IPO means we're going to ... push prices up, push the margins up, push down the feature sets, the only answer we can give is, watch us. Keep watching," he said. "Let's look at it in 15, 20 years' time."' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/01/30/2212232 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Linux On Mars: The Final Chapter
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 30 Jan '24

30 Jan '24

You may have heard that the “Ingenuity” helicopter, which has been flying on Mars for the last three years, came a cropper and broke one of its rotor blades a couple of weeks ago. Not bad for a project that was really put together as an afterthought, a proof of concept that was planned to maybe last 30 days and make five flights at most. Here <https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/01/now-that-weve-flown-on-mars-what-come…> is a description of some more details of how it was put together, within stringent limits on both mass and money. Apparently, a radiation-hardened RAD750 computer, which is normally used for such space missions, costs a quarter of a million USD. And would have weighed too much anyway. So they used a cheap, lightweight Qualcomm chip instead, state of the art for smartphones of just a few years ago. And massively more powerful. And of course they ran off-the-shelf open-source software on it <https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/meet-the-open-source-software-powering-nasas-…>, <https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/19/22291324/linux-perseverance-mars-curiosi…>, <https://spectrum.ieee.org/nasa-designed-perseverance-helicopter-rover-fly-a…>. Flying a chopper on Mars isn’t easy: the rotor tips on Ingenuity were moving at Mach 0.65 (on Mars, Mach 1.0, the speed of sound, is about 240m/s). A future chopper is planned to push this to Mach 0.95. You might say they were cutting corners on this design, which made it inherently more risky. But if the lower costs and simpler development can lead to shorter lead times, and hence more missions, maybe a higher failure rate would be worth it.

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Remembering Unix Desktops - and What We Can Learn From Them
by Peter Reutemann 29 Jan '24

29 Jan '24

'"As important as its historically underhanded business dealings were for its success, Microsoft didn't have to cheat to win," argues a new article in the Register. "The Unix companies were doing a great job of killing themselves off." You see, while there were many attempts to create software development standards for Unix, they were too general to do much good — for example Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) — or they became mired in the business consortium fights between the Open Systems Foundation and Unix International, which became known as the Unix wars. While the Unix companies were busy ripping each other to shreds, Microsoft was smiling all the way to the bank. The core problem was that the Unix companies couldn't settle on software standards. Independent Software Vendors (ISV) had to write applications for each Unix platform. Each of these had only a minute desktop market share. It simply made no business sense for programmers to write one version of an application for SCO OpenDesktop (also known as OpenDeathtrap), another for NeXTStep, and still another one for SunOS. Does that sound familiar? That kind of thing is still a problem for the Linux desktop, and it's why I'm a big fan of Linux containerized desktop applications, such as Red Hat's Flatpak and Canonical's Snap. By the time the two sides finally made peace by joining forces in The Open Group in 1996, it was too late. Unix was crowded out on the conventional desktop, and the workstation became pretty much a Sun Microsystems-only play. Linux's GPL license created an "enforced" consortia that allowed it to take over, according to the article — and with Linus Torvalds as Linux's single leader, "it avoided the old Unix trap of in-fighting... I've been to many Linux Plumbers meetings. There, I've seen him and the top Linux kernel developers work with each other without any drama. Today's Linux is a group effort... The Linux distributors and developers have learned their Unix history lessons. They've realized that it takes more than open source; it takes open standards and consensus to make a successful desktop operating system. And the article also points out that one of those early Unix desktops "is still alive, well, and running in about one in four desktops." That operating system, of course, is macOS X, the direct descendent of NeXT's NeXTSTEP. You could argue that macOS, based on the multi-threaded, multi-processing microkernel operating system Mach, BSD Unix, and the open source Darwin, is the most successful of all Unix operating systems. ' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/01/28/0241228 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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I abandoned OpenLiteSpeed and went back to good ol’ Nginx
by Peter Reutemann 29 Jan '24

29 Jan '24

'Since 2017, in what spare time I have (ha!), I help my colleague Eric Berger host his Houston-area weather forecasting site, Space City Weather. It’s an interesting hosting challenge—on a typical day, SCW does maybe 20,000–30,000 page views to 10,000–15,000 unique visitors, which is a relatively easy load to handle with minimal work. But when severe weather events happen—especially in the summer, when hurricanes lurk in the Gulf of Mexico—the site’s traffic can spike to more than a million page views in 12 hours. That level of traffic requires a bit more prep to handle. For a very long time, I ran SCW on a backend stack made up of HAProxy for SSL termination, Varnish Cache for on-box caching, and Nginx for the actual web server application—all fronted by Cloudflare to absorb the majority of the load. (I wrote about this setup at length on Ars a few years ago for folks who want some more in-depth details.) This stack was fully battle-tested and ready to devour whatever traffic we threw at it, but it was also annoyingly complex, with multiple cache layers to contend with, and that complexity made troubleshooting issues more difficult than I would have liked. So during some winter downtime two years ago, I took the opportunity to jettison some complexity and reduce the hosting stack down to a single monolithic web server application: OpenLiteSpeed.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/i-abandoned-openlitespeed-and-went-… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Unix Pioneer Ken Thompson Has Abandoned Apple For Linux
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 28 Jan '24

28 Jan '24

Something I didn’t hear about, which happened earlier last year <https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/unix-pioneer-ken-thompson-announces-hes-…>. Ken Thompson, one of the original Bell Labs crew that created Unix, now 80 years old, was asked what OS he uses, and he replied: I have, for most of my life — because I was sort of born into it — run Apple. Now recently, meaning within the last five years, I've become more and more depressed, and what Apple is doing to something that should allow you to work is just atrocious. But they are taking a lot of space and time to do it, so it's okay. And I have come, within the last month or two, to say, even though I've invested, you know, a zillion years in Apple — I'm throwing it away. And I'm going to Linux. To Raspbian in particular.

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OpenWrt, now 20 years old, is crafting its own future-proof reference hardware
by Peter Reutemann 24 Jan '24

24 Jan '24

'OpenWrt, the open source firmware that sprang from Linksys' use of open source code in its iconic WRT54G router and subsequent release of its work, is 20 years old this year. To keep the project going, lead developers have proposed creating a "fully upstream supported hardware design," one that would prevent the need for handling "binary blobs" in modern router hardware and let DIY router enthusiasts forge their own path. OpenWRT project members, 13 of which signed off on this hardware, are keeping the "OpenWrt One" simple, while including "some nice features we believe all OpenWrt supported platforms should have," including "almost unbrickable" low-level firmware, an on-board real-time clock with a battery backup, and USB-PD power. The price should be under $100 and the schematics and code publicly available. But OpenWrt will not be producing or selling these boards, "for a ton of reasons." The group is looking to the Banana Pi makers to distribute a fitting device, with every device producing a donation to the Software Freedom Conservancy earmarked for OpenWrt. That money could then be used for hosting expenses, or "maybe an OpenWrt summit."' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/openwrt-now-20-years-old-is-craftin… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Easy Relative Symbolic Links
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 Jan '24

23 Jan '24

You probably know about the “ln” command to create a new link to an existing file. You probably know about “ln -s” to create a symbolic link. But did you know about “ln -rs” to easily create relative symbolic links? Relative links are often preferable to absolute ones, because that way they stay valid if the whole containing directory tree is moved to a different location (e.g. as the result of a bind mount). But typing the right number of “../” prefixes can get quite fiddly. And if you want to rely on autocomplete to help, you have to change directory to the destination where the symlink is to be created. Instead, a simpler way is to use “ln -rs”, then use autocomplete from wherever you are to get to the right source file/directory, and the ln command will automatically convert the resulting path, whatever it might be (either absolute or relative to your current working directory) to a suitable relative one based on the destination for the link. <https://manpages.debian.org/ln.1.en.html>

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HP Says The Quiet Part Out Loud
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 Jan '24

23 Jan '24

You’d think, if you were buying a printer, you were the one making the investment, and expecting an outcome of suitable print quality (and quantity) in return. But not, it seems, if you buy an HP printer. Company boss Enrique Lores has made it quite clear <https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/19/hps_ceo_spells_it_out/>: "Every time a customer buys a printer, it's an investment for us. We are investing in that customer, and if that customer doesn't print enough or doesn't use our supplies, it's a bad investment." If you think this is some offhand remark, taken out of context or something, how about this statement from December, by their CFO of the time: "We absolutely see when you move a customer from that pure transactional model ... whether it's Instant Ink, plus adding on that paper, we sort of see a 20 percent uplift on the value of that customer because you're locking that person, committing to a longer-term relationship." In short, they are going to squeeze you for as much ink revenue as they can. Third-party ink cartridges are obviously a threat to this business model, that must be exterminated. I wonder, if they could figure out how to make you get the paper from them as well, they wouldn’t do that ... oh wait ... she already mentioned paper ...

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Timezone Data Changes
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 Jan '24

23 Jan '24

The maintainers of the timezone database (tzdata) have been cleaning up some things lately. Namely, removing all the alias names that are not of the common IANA «region»/«city» form, but refer to specific countries, from the core package. NZ’s two timezones, “NZ” and “NZ-CHAT” were among these special cases. Also the ones beginning “US/” for the various timezones in the USA. <https://tracker.debian.org/news/1451157/accepted-tzdata-2023c-8-source-into…> <https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1040997> <https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1056908> These latter names are still available if you install the “tzdata-legacy” package. So you need to have that installed if you want to continue setting “TZ=NZ”. Either that, or learn to start saying “TZ=Pacific/Auckland” instead.

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All This AI Stuff Costs A Lot Of Money
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 21 Jan '24

21 Jan '24

According to this article <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/alexa-is-in-trouble-paid-for-alexa-…> (based on anonymous sources), Amazon is on a struggle to make money out of its Alexa service, particularly a new, “Generative-AI”-based version coming out at some non-yet-publicly-disclosed point. I was flabbergasted at this: Amazon has to do something to turn Alexa into a viable revenue source. In late 2022, Insider reported that Alexa was on track to lose Amazon $10 billion that year. The following months were filled with numerous layoffs at Amazon ... $10 billion!? I wonder how much of that is *not* the electricity bills for running all the servers ...

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