Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: Given the recent change by Redis to adopt dual source-available licensing for all their releases moving forward (Redis Source Available License v2 and Server Side Public License v1), the Linux Foundation announced today their fork of Redis. The Linux Foundation went public today with their intent to fork Valkey as an open-source alternative to the Redis in-memory store. Due to the Redis licensing changes, Valkey is forking from Redis 7.2.4 and will maintain a BSD 3-clause license. Google, AWS, Oracle, and others are helping form this new Valkey project.

The Linux Foundation press release shares: "To continue improving on this important technology and allow for unfettered distribution of the project, the community created Valkey, an open source high performance key-value store. Valkey supports the Linux, macOS, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD platforms. In addition, the community will continue working on its existing roadmap including new features such as a more reliable slot migration, dramatic scalability and stability improvements to the clustering system, multi-threaded performance improvements, triggers, new commands, vector search support, and more. Industry participants, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap Inc. are supporting Valkey. They are focused on making contributions that support the long-term health and viability of the project so that everyone can benefit from it."

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, writing for ComputerWorld: Essentially, all software is built using open source. By Synopsys' count, 96% of all codebases contain open-source software. Lately, though, there's been a very disturbing trend. A company will make its program using open source, make millions from it, and then -- and only then -- switch licenses, leaving their contributors, customers, and partners in the lurch as they try to grab billions. I'm sick of it. The latest IT melodrama baddie is Redis. Its program, which goes by the same name, is an extremely popular in-memory database. (Unless you're a developer, chances are you've never heard of it.) One recent valuation shows Redis to be worth about $2 billion -- even without an AI play! That, anyone can understand.

What did it do? To quote Redis: "Beginning today, all future versions of Redis will be released with source-available licenses. Starting with Redis 7.4, Redis will be dual-licensed under the Redis Source Available License (RSALv2) and Server Side Public License (SSPLv1). Consequently, Redis will no longer be distributed under the three-clause Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD)." For those of you who aren't open-source licensing experts, this means developers can no longer use Redis' code. Sure, they can look at it, but they can't export, borrow from, or touch it.

Redis pulled this same kind of trick in 2018 with some of its subsidiary code. Now it's done so with the company's crown jewels. Redis is far from the only company to make such a move. Last year, HashiCorp dumped its main program Terraform's Mozilla Public License (MPL) for the Business Source License (BSL) 1.1. Here, the name of the new license game is to prevent anyone from competing with Terraform. Would it surprise you to learn that not long after this, HashiCorp started shopping itself around for a buyer? Before this latest round of license changes, MongoDB and Elastic made similar shifts. Again, you might never have heard of these companies or their programs, but each is worth, at a minimum, hundreds of millions of dollars. And, while you might not know it, if your company uses cloud services behind the scenes, chances are you're using one or more of their programs,

Amazon plans to spend almost $150 billion in the coming 15 years on data centers, giving the cloud-computing giant the firepower to handle an expected explosion in demand for artificial intelligence applications and other digital services. From a report: The spending spree is a show of force as the company looks to maintain its grip on the cloud services market, where it holds about twice the share of No. 2 player Microsoft. Sales growth at Amazon Web Services slowed to a record low last year as business customers cut costs and delayed modernization projects. Now spending is starting to pick up again, and Amazon is keen to secure land and electricity for its power-hungry facilities.

"We're expanding capacity quite significantly," said Kevin Miller, an AWS vice president who oversees the company's data centers. "I think that just gives us the ability to get closer to customers." Over the past two years, according to a Bloomberg tally, Amazon has committed to spending $148 billion to build and operate data centers around the world. The company plans to expand existing server farm hubs in northern Virginia and Oregon as well as push into new precincts, including Mississippi, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia.

Tom Warren reports via The Verge: Microsoft is starting to preview mouse and keyboard support for Xbox Cloud Gaming today. Xbox Insiders will be able to start playing with their mouse and keyboard in Edge, Chrome, or the Xbox app on Windows PCs, nearly two years after Microsoft announced it was preparing to add mouse and keyboard support to its Xbox Cloud Gaming (xCloud) service. Not every game will be supported during the preview, but there's a large selection, including Fortnite, Sea of Thieves, and Halo Infinite. Microsoft warns that some games will display controller UI elements briefly before adapting to mouse and keyboard input after you start interacting with the game.

If you're interested in trying games with mouse and keyboard in the browser version of Xbox Cloud Gaming, then you'll need to be in full-screen mode, according to Microsoft. This is so the game can correctly capture your pointer as input. If you want to exit out of mouse and keyboard mode and use an Xbox controller instead, there's an ALT+F9 shortcut to do so. The full list of supported games include: Fortnite (browser only), ARK Survival Evolved, Sea of Thieves, Grounded, Halo Infinite, Atomic Heart, Sniper Elite 5, Deep Rock Galactic, High on Life, Zombie Army 4 Dead War, Gears Tactics, Pentiment, Doom 64, and Age of Empires 2.

Tom Warren reports via The Verge: Microsoft is naming Pavan Davuluri as its new Windows and Surface chief today. After Panos Panay's surprise departure to Amazon last year, Microsoft split up the Windows and Surface groups under two different leaders. Davuluri took over the Surface silicon and devices work, with Mikhail Parakhin leading a new team focused on Windows and web experiences. Now both Windows and Surface will be Davuluri's responsibility, as Parakhin has "decided to explore new roles."

The Verge has obtained an internal memo from Rajesh Jha, Microsoft's head of experiences and devices, outlining the new Windows organization. Microsoft is now bringing together its Windows and devices teams once more. "This will enable us to take a holistic approach to building silicon, systems, experiences, and devices that span Windows client and cloud for this AI era," explains Jha. Pavan Davuluri is now the leader of Microsoft's Windows and Surface team, reporting directly to Rajesh Jha. Davuluri has worked at Microsoft for more than 23 years and was deeply involved in the company's work with Qualcomm and AMD to create custom Surface processors.

Mikhail Parakhin will now report to Kevin Scott during a transition phase, but his future at Microsoft looks uncertain, and it's likely those "new roles" will be outside the company. Parakhin had been working closely on Bing Chat before taking on the broader Windows engineering responsibilities and changes to Microsoft Edge. The Windows shake-up comes just days after Google DeepMind co-founder and former Inflection AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman joined Microsoft as the CEO of a new AI team. Microsoft also hired a bunch of Inflection AI employees, including co-founder Karen Simonyan who is now the chief scientist of Microsoft AI.

Indian Express calls it "the ultimate smartphone killer". (Coming soon, its laser-on-your-palm feature will display stock prices, sports scores, and flight statuses.)

Humane's Ai Pin can even translate what you say, repeating it out loud in another language (with 50 different languages supported). And it can read you summaries of what's on your favorite web sites, so "You can just surf the web with your voice," according to a new video released this week.

The video also shows it answering specific questions like "What's that song by 21 Savage with the violin intro?" (And later, while the song is playing, answering more questions like "This was sampled from another song. What song was that?") But then co-founder Imran Chaudhri — an iPhone designer and one of several former Apple employees at Humane — demonstrated a "Vision" feature that's coming soon. Holding a Sony Walkman he asks the Pin to "Look at this and tell me when it first came out" — and the Pin obliges. ("The Sony Walkman WM-F73 was released in 1986...") In another demo it correctly supplied the designer of an Air Jordan basketball shoe.

They're also working on integrating this into a Nutrition Tracking application. (A demonstrator held a doughnut and asked the Pin to identify how much sugar was in it.) If you tell the Pin that you've eaten the doughnut, it can then calculate your intake of carbs, protein, and fats.

And in the video the Pin responded within seconds to the command "Make a spreadsheet about top consumer tech reviewers on YouTube [with] real names, subscriber counts, and URLs." It performed the research and created the spreadsheet, which appears on the demonstrator's laptop, apparently logged in to Humane's cloud-based user platform.

In the video Humane's co-founder stresses that its Ai Pin does all this without downloading applications, "which allows me to stay present in the moment and flow." But while it can also make phone calls and sends text messages, Imran Chaudhri adds that "Ai Pin is a completely new form factor for compute. It's never been about replacing. It's always been about creating new ways to interact with what you need. So instead of having to sit down to use a computer, or reaching in to your pocket and pulling out your phone and navigating apps, Ai Pin allows you to simply act on something the moment you think about it — letting AI do all the work for you."

Or, as they say later "This is about technology adapting and reacting to you. Not you having to adapt to it."

There's also talk about their "AI OS" — named Cosmos — with the Pin described as "our first entry point" into that operating system, with other devices planned to support it in the future. (Mashable's reporter notes that Humane's Ai Pin is backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and writes "I was impressed with how well it worked.") The video even ends with an update for SDK developers. In the second half of 2024, "you're going to be able to connect your services to the Ai Pin using REST APIs and OAuth." Phase two will let developers run their code directly on Humane's cloud platform — while Phase three will see developers codes on Ai Pin devices, "to get access to the mic, the camera, the sensors, and the laser. We are so excited to see what you're gonna build."

Humane says its Ai Pin will start shipping at the end of March, with priority orders arriving starting on April 11th.

Slashdot reader christoban writes: In what may be an issue for Sun-obscuring strategies to combat global warming, it turns out that during solar eclipses, low level cumulus clouds rapidly disappear, reducing by a factor of 4, researchers have found. The news comes from the science magazine Eos (published by the nonprofit organization of atmosphere/ocean/space scientists, the American Geophysical Union). Victor J. H. Trees, a geoscientist at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, and his colleagues recently analyzed cloud cover data obtained during an annular eclipse in 2005, visible in parts of Europe and Africa. They mined visible and infrared imagery collected by two geostationary satellites operated by the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites. Going to space was key, Trees said. "If you really want to quantify how clouds behave and how they react to a solar eclipse, it helps to study a large area. That's why we want to look from space...." [T]hey tracked cloud evolution for several hours leading up to the eclipse, during the eclipse, and for several hours afterward.

Low-level cumulus clouds — which tend to top out at altitudes around 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) — were strongly affected by the degree of solar obscuration. Cloud cover started to decrease when about 15% of the Sun's face was covered, about 30 minutes after the start of the eclipse. The clouds started to return only about 50 minutes after maximum obscuration. And whereas typical cloud cover hovered around 40% in noneclipse conditions, less than 10% of the sky was covered with clouds during maximum obscuration, the team noted. "On a large scale, the cumulus clouds started to disappear," Trees said... The temperature of the ground matters when it comes to cumulus clouds, Trees said, because they are low enough to be significantly affected by whatever is happening on Earth's surface...

Beyond shedding light on the physics of cloud dissipation during solar eclipses, these new findings also have implications for future geoengineering efforts, Trees and his collaborators suggested. Discussions are underway to mitigate the effects of climate change by, for instance, seeding the atmosphere with aerosols or launching solar reflectors into space to prevent some of the Sun's light from reaching Earth. Such geoengineering holds promise for cooling our planet, researchers agree, but its repercussions are largely unexplored and could be widespread and irreversible.

These new results suggest that cloud cover could decrease with geoengineering efforts involving solar obscuration. And because clouds reflect sunlight, the efficacy of any effort might correspondingly decrease, Trees said. That's an effect that needs to be taken into account when considering different options, the researchers concluded.
Another article on the site warns that "Planting Trees May Not Be as Good for the Climate as Previously Believed."

"The climate benefits of trees storing carbon dioxide is partially offset by dark forests' absorption of more heat from the Sun, and compounds they release that slow the destruction of methane in the atmosphere."

"Microsoft confirmed that a memory leak introduced with the March 2024 Windows Server security updates is behind a widespread issue causing Windows domain controllers to crash," BleepingComputer reported Thursday.

Friday Microsoft wrote that the issue "was resolved in the out-of-band update KB5037422," only available via the Microsoft Update Catalog. (The update "is not available from Windows Update and will not install automatically.")

BleepingComputer reported the leak only affected "enterprise systems using the impacted Windows Server platform," and home users were not affected. But Microsoft confirmed it impacted all domain controller servers with the latest Windows Server 2012 R2, 2016, 2019, and 2022 updates: As BleepingComputer first reported on Wednesday and as many admins have warned over the last week, affected servers are freezing and restarting unexpectedly due to a Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) process memory leak introduced with this month's cumulative updates.

"Since installation of the March updates (Exchange as well as regular Windows Server updates) most of our DCs show constantly increasing lsass memory usage (until they die)," one admin said.

"Our symptoms were ballooning memory usage on the lsass.exe process after installing KB5035855 (Server 2016) and KB5035857 (Server 2022) to the point that all physical and virtual memory was consumed and the machine hung," another Windows admin told BleepingComputer.
The leak "is observed when on-premises and cloud-based Active Directory Domain Controllers service Kerberos authentication requests," Microsoft wrote. "Extreme memory leaks may cause LSASS to crash, which triggers an unscheduled reboot of underlying domain controllers..."

"We strongly recommend you do not apply the March 2024 security update on DCs and install KB5037422 instead..."

Longtime Slashdot reader jgulla shares an announcement from Redis: Beginning today, all future versions of Redis will be released with source-available licenses. Starting with Redis 7.4, Redis will be dual-licensed under the Redis Source Available License (RSALv2) and Server Side Public License (SSPLv1). Consequently, Redis will no longer be distributed under the three-clause Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The new source-available licenses allow us to sustainably provide permissive use of our source code.

We're leading Redis into its next phase of development as a real-time data platform with a unified set of clients, tools, and core Redis product offerings. The Redis source code will continue to be freely available to developers, customers, and partners through Redis Community Edition. Future Redis source-available releases will unify core Redis with Redis Stack, including search, JSON, vector, probabilistic, and time-series data models in one free, easy-to-use package as downloadable software. This will allow anyone to easily use Redis across a variety of contexts, including as a high-performance key/value and document store, a powerful query engine, and a low-latency vector database powering generative AI applications. [...]

Under the new license, cloud service providers hosting Redis offerings will no longer be permitted to use the source code of Redis free of charge. For example, cloud service providers will be able to deliver Redis 7.4 only after agreeing to licensing terms with Redis, the maintainers of the Redis code. These agreements will underpin support for existing integrated solutions and provide full access to forthcoming Redis innovations. In practice, nothing changes for the Redis developer community who will continue to enjoy permissive licensing under the dual license. At the same time, all the Redis client libraries under the responsibility of Redis will remain open source licensed. Redis will continue to support its vast partner ecosystem -- including managed service providers and system integrators -- with exclusive access to all future releases, updates, and features developed and delivered by Redis through its Partner Program. There is no change for existing Redis Enterprise customers.

couchslug shares a report from ITPro: A European cloud trade body has called for an investigation into Broadcom amid concerns over changes it has made to VMware licensing structures. The Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) consortium called on regulatory and legislative bodies across Europe to investigate the changes Broadcom has made to the VMware operating model, which it says will "decimate" the region's cloud infrastructure. "CISPE calls upon regulators, legislators and courts across Europe to swiftly scrutinize the actions of Broadcom in unilaterally canceling license terms for essential virtualization software," the trade body said in a statement. Since acquiring VMware in November 2023, Broadcom has embarked on a comprehensive overhaul of software licensing at the firm, which has drawn widespread criticism from customers. Broadcom stated it would continue to support customers under a perpetual licensing agreement for the period defined in the contract, but following this customers would need to exchange any remaining licenses for subscription-based products. This has left both cloud service vendors and customers in limbo, according to CISPE, without any solid information on how, when, or if they will be able to license VMware products essential for their operations from April 2024. Moreover, even if they are able to relicense the VMware software, a number of customers reported dramatic price hikes of as much as 12 times.

CISPE's characterisation of the move was far less charitable, arguing Broadcom is using VMware's market dominance, controlling almost 45% of the virtualization market, to charge exorbitant rents from cloud providers. Several CISPE members admitted that without the ability to license VMware products they will be unable to operate and will go bankrupt, with some stating that over 75% of their revenue depends on VMware virtualization tech. Members added that they often received termination notices late, if at all, with short notice periods that spanned just a few weeks. In addition, CISPE also complained about the decision to remove hundreds of products without any notice, and re-bundle the outstanding products under new prohibitive contract terms, despite there being no changes to the products themselves. Francisco Mingorance, secretary general of CISPE, said the changes will hurt both European customers and cloud service providers by increasing costs and reducing choice. At a time when our members are moving to support the requirements for switching and portability between cloud services outlined in the Data Act, Broadcom is holding the sector to ransom by leveraging VMware's dominance of the virtualization sector to enforce unfair license terms and extract unfair rents from European cloud customers," Mingorance said.

CISPE noted that for some cloud sector applications that require certifications by software or service providers, VMware products are the only viable option. As such, the association called for Broadcom to be recognized as a designated gatekeeper under the terms of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) that came into force on March 7, 2024. Mingorance argued Broadcom's moves will only further restrict an already limited set of options for cloud providers in Europe, warning that Broadcom has a dangerous degree of control over the region's digital ecosystems. "As well as inflicting financial damage on the European digital economy, these actions will decimate Europe's independent cloud infrastructure sector and further reduce the diversity of choice for customers," he explained. "Dominant software providers, in any sector from productivity software to virtualization, must not be allowed to wield life or death power over Europe's digital ecosystems."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Even if you decide to stop offering free editions, you don't get to stop providing the source code to FOSS, users of JasperReports Server are complaining. Cloud Software Group -- the post-merger offspring of Citrix and Tibco -- has decided to withdraw the community edition of its JasperReports Server. Now all you can get is the commercial edition, with a 30-day free trial. Effectively, this seems like a similar tactic to Red Hat's unpopular changes to the way that the RHEL source code is distributed. Some of the JasperReports source code is still on Github, but not everything. The JasperSoft community website has the grumbling of unhappy users -- as does Reddit.

One user on the community website commented: "Are you aware Jasper Server CE was under the Affero GPL, and you can't delete everything? "You cannot just change the license of the previous versions and call it a day. I mean, we the users, have the right to fork it using the same license or a compatible one," the user protested. JasperSoft has been developing its reporting tools in the open for well over a decade -- the Reg was reporting on it nearly twenty years ago. Tibco acquired the company for some $185 million in 2014. We're not certain that things are going very well for the new outfit. Early last year, the merger was followed by a round of job losses, and the company has also more recently doubled its prices on some offerings.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Starting in early 2023, Williams team principal James Vowles and chief technical officer Pat Fry started reworking the F1 team's systems for designing and building its car. It would be painful, but the pain would keep the team from falling even further behind. As they started figuring out new processes and systems, they encountered what they considered a core issue: Microsoft Excel. The Williams car build workbook, with roughly 20,000 individual parts, was "a joke," Vowles recently told The Race. "Impossible to navigate and impossible to update." This colossal Excel file lacked information on how much each of those parts cost and the time it took to produce them, along with whether the parts were already on order. Prioritizing one car section over another, from manufacture through inspection, was impossible, Vowles suggested.

"When you start tracking now hundreds of thousands of components through your organization moving around, an Excel spreadsheet is useless," Vowles told The Race. Because of the multiple states each part could be in -- ordered, backordered, inspected, returned -- humans are often left to work out the details. "And once you start putting that level of complexity in, which is where modern Formula 1 is, the Excel spreadsheet falls over, and humans fall over. And that's exactly where we are." The consequences of this row/column chaos, and the resulting hiccups, were many. Williams missed early pre-season testing in 2019. Workers sometimes had to physically search the team's factory for parts. The wrong parts got priority, other parts came late, and some piled up. And yet transitioning to a modern tracking system was "viciously expensive," Fry told The Race, and making up for the painful process required "humans pushing themselves to the absolute limits and breaking."

The idea that a modern Formula 1 team, building some of the most fantastically advanced and efficient machines on Earth, would be using Excel to build those machines might strike you as odd. F1 cars cost an estimated $12-$16 million each, with resource cap of about $145 million. But none of this really matters, and it actually makes sense, if you've ever worked IT at nearly any decent-sized organization. Then again, it's not even uncommon in Formula 1. When Sebastian Anthony embedded with the Renault team, he reported back for Ars in 2017 that Renault Sport Formula One's Excel design and build spreadsheet was 77,000 lines long -- more than three times as large as the Williams setup that spurred an internal revolution in 2023.

Every F1 team has its own software setup, Anthony wrote, but they have to integrate with a lot of other systems: Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and wind tunnel results, rapid prototyping and manufacturing, and inventory. This leaves F1 teams "susceptible to the plague of legacy software," Anthony wrote, though he noted that Renault had moved on to a more dynamic cloud-based system that year. (Renault was also "a big Microsoft shop" in other areas, like email and file sharing, at the time.) One year prior to Anthony's excavation, Adam Banks wrote for Ars about the benefits of adopting cloud-based tools for enterprise resource planning (ERP). You adopt a cloud-based business management software to go "Beyond Excel." "If PowerPoint is the universal language businesses use to talk to one another, their internal monologue is Excel," Banks wrote. The issue is that all the systems and processes a business touches are complex and generate all kinds of data, but Excel is totally cool with taking in all of it. Or at least 1,048,576 rows of it. Banks cited Tim Worstall's 2013 contention that Excel could be "the most dangerous software on the planet." Back then, international investment bankers were found manually copying and pasting Excel between Excel sheets to do their work, and it raised alarm.

NVIDIA has been working on adding generative AI to non-playable characters (NPCs) for a while now. The company is hoping a newly-announced partnership with Ubisoft will accelerate development of this technology and, ultimately, bring these AI-driven NPCs to modern games. From a report: Ubisoft helped build new "NEO NPCs" by using NVIDIA's Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) technology, with an assist from dynamic NPC experts Inworld AI. The end result? Characters that don't repeat the same phrase over and over, while ignoring the surrounding violent mayhem. These NEO NPCs are said to interact in real time with players, the environment and other in-game characters. NVIDIA says this opens up "new possibilities for emergent storytelling." To that end, Ubisoft's narrative team built complete backgrounds, knowledge bases and conversational styles for two NPCs as a proof of concept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Back in 2004, in the pre-Web 2.0 era, research indicated that BitTorrent was responsible for an impressive 35% of all Internet traffic. At the time, file-sharing via peer-to-peer networks was the main traffic driver as no other services consumed large amounts of bandwidth. Fast-forward two decades and these statistics are ancient history. With the growth of video streaming, including services such as YouTube, Netflix, and TikTok, file-sharing traffic is nothing more than a drop in today's data pool. [...]

This week, Canadian broadband management company Sandvine released its latest Global Internet Phenomena Report which makes it clear that BitTorrent no longer leads any charts. The latest data show that video and social media are the leading drivers of downstream traffic, accounting for more than half of all fixed access and mobile data worldwide. Needless to say, BitTorrent is nowhere to be found in the list of 'top apps'. Looking at upstream traffic, BitTorrent still has some relevance on fixed access networks where it accounts for 4% of the bandwidth. However, it's been surpassed by cloud storage apps, FaceTime, Google, and YouTube. On mobile connections, BitTorrent no longer makes it into the top ten. The average of 46 MB upstream traffic per subscriber shouldn't impress any file-sharer. However, since only a small percentage of all subscribers use BitTorrent, the upstream traffic per user is of course much higher.

Databricks CTO Matei Zaharia "said that Databricks had to keep track of scheduling a million things," remembers adjunct MIT professor Michael Stonebraker. " He said that this can't be done with traditional operating system scheduling, and so this was done out of a Postgres database. And then he started to whine that Postgres was too slow, and I told him we can do better than that...."

This resulted in DBOS — short for "database operating system" — which they teamed up to build with teams Stanford and MIT, according to The Next Platform: They founded a company to commercialize the idea in April 2023 and secured $8.5 million initial seed funding to start building the real DBOS. Engine Ventures and Construct Capital led the funding, along with Sinewave and GutBrain Ventures...

"The state that the operating system has to keep track of — memory, files, messages, and so on — is approximately linear to the resources you have got," says Stonebraker. "So without me saying another word, keeping track of operating system state is a database problem not addressed by current operating system schedulers. Moreover, OLTP [Online Transaction Processing] database performance has gone up dramatically, and that is why we thought instead of running the database system in user space on top of the operating system, why don't we invert our thinking 180 degrees and run the operating system on top of the database, with all of the operating services are coded in SQL...?"

For now, DBOS can give the same kind of performance as that full blown Linux operating system, and thanks to the distributed database underpinnings of its kernel, it can do things that a Linux kernel just cannot do... One is provide reliable execution, which means that if a program running atop DBOS is ever interrupted, it starts where it left off and does not have to redo its work from some arbitrary earlier point and does not crash and have to start from the beginning. And because every little bit of the state of the operating system — and therefore the applications that run atop it — is preserved, you can go backwards in time in the system and restart the operating system if it experiences some sort of anomaly, such as a bad piece of application software running or a hack attack. You can use this "time travel" feature, as Stonebraker calls it, to reproduce what are called heisenbugs — ones that are very hard to reproduce precisely because there is no shared state in the distributed Linux and Kubernetes environment and that are increasingly prevalent in a world of microservices.

The other benefit of the DBOS is that it presents a smaller attack surface for hackers, which boosts security, and that you analyze the metrics of the operating system in place since they are already in a NoSQL database that can be queried rather than aggregating a bunch of log files from up and down the software stack to try to figure out what is going on...

There is also a custom tier for DBOS, which we presume costs money, that can use other databases and datastores for user application data, stores more than three days of log data, can have multiple users per account, that adds email and Slack support with DBOS techies, and that is available on other clouds as well as AWS.
The operating system kernel/scheduler "is itself largely a database," with services written in TypeScript, according to the article. The first iteration used the FoundationDB distributed key-value store for its scheduling core (open sourced by Apple in 2018), according to the article — "a blazingly fast NoSQL database... Stonebraker says there is no reason to believe that DBOS can't scale across 1 million cores or more and support Java, Python, and other application languages as they are needed by customers..."

And the article speculates they could take things even further. "There is no reason why DBOS cannot complete the circle and not only have a database as an operating system kernel, but also have a relational database as the file system for applications."

Pi was calculated to 100 trillion decimal places in 2022 by a Google team lead by cloud developer advocate Emma Haruka Iwao.

But 2024's "pi day" saw a new announcement... After successfully breaking the speed record for calculating pi to 100 trillion digits last year, the team at StorageReview has taken it up a notch, revealing all the numbers of Pi up to 105 trillion digits! Spoiler: the 105 trillionth digit of Pi is 6!

Owner and Editor-in-Chief Brian Beeler led the team that used 36 Solidigm SSDs (nearly a petabyte) for their unprecedented capacity and reliability required to store the calculated digits of Pi. Although there is no practical application for this many digits, the exercise underscores the astounding capabilities of modern hardware and an achievement in computational and storage technology...

For an undertaking of this size, which took 75 days, the role of storage cannot be understated. "For the Pi computation, we're entirely restricted by storage, says Beeler. "Faster CPUs will help accelerate the math, but the limiting factor to many new world records is the amount of local storage in the box. For this run, we're again leveraging Solidigm D5-P5316 30.72TB SSDs to help us get a little over 1P flash in the system.

"These SSDs are the only reason we could break through the prior records and hit 105 trillion Pi digits."
"Leveraging a combination of open-source and proprietary software, the team at StorageReview optimized the algorithmic process to fully exploit the hardware's capabilities, reducing computational time and enhancing efficiency," Beeler says in the announcement.

There's a video on YouTube where the team discusses their effort.

According to Bloomberg, Apple has acquired Canada-based AI startup DarwinAI for an undisclosed sum. Macworld reports: Apple has reportedly folded the DarwinAI staff into its own AI team, including DarwinAI co-founder Alexander Wong, an AI researcher at the University of Waterloo who "has published over 600 refereed journal and conference papers, as well as patents, in various fields such as computational imaging, artificial intelligence, computer vision, and multimedia systems."

According to its LinkedIn profile, DarwinAI is "a rapidly growing visual quality inspection company providing manufacturers an end-to-end solution to improve product quality and increase production efficiency." In layman's terms, that means Apple is likely interested in DarwinAI to streamline its manufacturing to be more efficient. That's something that could save Apple a ton of money in annual costs.

Far more interesting to our consumer devices, however, is Bloomberg's report that DarwinAI's tech can be used to make AI models more efficient in general. Apple has been said to want any generative AI features to run on the device rather than the cloud, so models will need to be as small as possible and DarwinAI could definitely help there. Last month, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the iPhone maker sees "incredible breakthrough potential for generative AI, which is why we're currently investing significantly in this area. We believe that will unlock transformative opportunities for users when it comes to productivity, problem solving and more."

In a blog post Thursday, Broadcom CEO and President Hock Tan acknowledged the discomfort VMware customers and partners have experienced after the sweeping changes that Broadcom has instituted since it acquired the company nearly four months ago. "Of course, we recognize that this level of change has understandably created some unease among our customers and partners," writes Tan. "But all of these moves have been with the goals of innovating faster, meeting our customers' needs more effectively, and making it easier to do business with us." Ars Technica reports: Tan believes that the changes will ultimately "provide greater profitability and improved market opportunities" for channel partners. However, many IT solution provider businesses that were working with VMware have already been disrupted. For example, after buying VMware, Broadcom took over the top 2,000 VMware accounts from VMware channel partners. In a March earnings call, Tan said that Broadcom has been focused on upselling those customers. He also said Broadcom expects VMware revenue to grow double-digits quarter over quarter for the rest of the fiscal year. [...]

In his blog post, Tan defended the subscription-only licensing model, calling it "the industry standard." He said VMware started accelerating its transition to this strategy in 2019, (which is before Broadcom bought VMware). He also linked to a February blog post from VMware's Prashanth Shenoy, VP of product and technical marketing for the Cloud, Infrastructure, Platforms, and Solutions group at VMware, that also noted acquisition-related "concerns" but claimed the evolution would be fiscally prudent.

Microsoft has eliminated egress fees for customers removing data from its Azure cloud, joining Amazon Web Services and Google in this move. The decision comes as the European Data Act's provisions targeting lock-in terms are set to take effect in 2025. Microsoft adds: Azure already offers the first 100GB/month of egressed data for free to all customers in all Azure regions around the world. If you need to egress more than 100GB/month, please follow these steps to claim your credit. Contact Azure Support for details on how to start the data transfer-out process. Please comply with the instructions to be eligible for the credit. Azure Support will apply the credit when the data transfer process is complete and all Azure subscriptions associated to the account have been canceled. The exemption on data transfer out to the internet fees also aligns with the European Data Act and is accessible to all Azure customers globally and from any Azure region.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Wired article: The U.S. economy is showing remarkable health, but in the tech industry, layoffs keep coming. For those out of work, finding a new position can become a full-time job. And in tech -- a sector notoriously always looking for the next hot, new thing -- some people whose days as fresh-faced coders are long gone say that having decades of experience can feel like a disadvantage. Ageism is a longtime problem in the tech industry. Database startup RelevantDB went viral in 2021 after it posted a job listing bragging, "We hire old people," which played off industry stereotypes. In 2020, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that IBMhad engaged in age discrimination, pushing out older workers to make room for younger ones. (The company has denied engaging in "systemic age discrimination.") A recent LinkedIn ad that shows an older woman unfamiliar with tech jargon saying her son sells invisible clouds triggered a backlash from people who say it unfairly portrayed older people as out of touch. In response, Jim Habig, LinkedIn's vice president of marketing, says: "This ad didn't meet our goal to create experiences where all professionals feel welcomed and valued, and we are working to replace the spot." [...]

Tech companies have laid off more than 400,000 workers over the past two years, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks job cuts in the industry. To older workers, the purge is both a reminder of the dotcom bust, and a new frontier. The industry's generally consistent growth in recent decades as the economy has become more tech-centric means that many more senior workers -- which in tech can sometimes be considered to mean over 35 but includes people in their late forties, fifties, or sixties -- may have less experience with job hunting. For decades, tech workers could easily hop between jobs in their networks, often poached by recruiters. And as tech companies boomed during the Covid-19 pandemic's early days, increased demand for skills gave workers leverage. Now the power has shifted to the employers as companies seek to become efficient and correct that over hiring phase, and applicants are hitting walls. Workers have to network, stay active on LinkedIn, join message boards, and stand out. With four generations now clocking in to work, things can feel crowded.