Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

I'm not going to be talking about the company per se. I'm talking about a generalized problem with AI and a very real problem with the worldwide growth of data centers.

This company just built a supercomputer with 22,000 H100 GPUs. That is TWENTY-TWO THOUSAND EXTREMELY HIGH-END SPECIALIZED GRAPHICS CARDS.

This computer consumes THIRTY-ONE MEGAWATTS OF POWER. That is how much power 6,000 HOMES consume in a DAY.

There are questions as to how this almost constant construction of data centers are going to be powered. For example, in Dublin, Ireland, they have a moratorium in building data centers in the town center because they can't power them without cutting power to the residents! And there are more important questions as to how all this heat will be dealt with.

A few months ago I posted about a data center in England that put a pod of computers into a mineral oil bath and is using a heat exchanger to help heat a local pool. That's pretty awesome. But there are a finite number of pools that need heating. Microsoft and others have been experimenting with putting pods of data centers underwater for cooling.

But the demand for AI has just begun. I just read an article about Y Combinator, a tech startup incubator, over 35% of new projects coming to them for assistance are AI.

We have not yet begun to truly cook this planet! Makes me glad that I'll be gone in 20-30 years or fewer.

Oh, and those H100 GPUs? Can be used for no other purpose. Like crypto mining cards, they can be used for only high-intensity computing. Now, those 22,000 cards don't represent 22,000 computer chassis. They can put like 10-20 cards in one chassis. The cards are designed with no fans and the chassis have big forced air and water-cooling systems to keep them cool. Very different from most conventional PCs.

So the next time someone says global warming isn't real, tell them about ONE supercomputer eating the power of 6,000 homes!

While Gordon may not be a household name, you might be familiar with a little company that he co-founded a lot of years ago: Intel.

He also coined the phrase Moore's Law, in which he states that transistor density will double about every 18 months. And it was largely proven correct. Now, the interesting thing is that he posited Moore's Law BEFORE the integrated circuit was invented!

He had an interesting life, which included him working with Robert Shockley, a person whose name should be familiar with anyone heavily interested in electronics: he won the Nobel Prize as one of the co-inventors of the TRANSISTOR.

Gordon founded a philanthropic organization that gave out over $5 billion in grants and such in the San Francisco area.

Sounds like one heck of a life.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gordon-moore-dead_n_641ebdbce4b0b8ee3bd25f05

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/gordon-moore-obituary.html

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/23/03/25/0044230/intel-co-foundercreator-of-moores-law-gordon-moore-dies-at-age-94

The high-performance cluster server is submerged in a pool of mineral oil - a very effective way to cool systems - and a heat-exchanger transfers the heat into the children's pool! The pool still has a boiler in case it gets too low, but overall it will save a lot of money.

The company behind the install is trying to create more installations like this to recover waste heat - this pool installation claims to recover 97%(!) of its waste heat - rather than just venting it into the air and causing more climate disruption.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/free-data-center-heat-is-allegedly-saving-a-struggling-public-pool-24k-a-year/

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/23/03/17/2037217/free-data-center-heat-is-allegedly-saving-a-struggling-public-pool-24k-a-year

I'm doing an internship in our local university library through April, and my main task is scanning their annual 'Reports To The President', a précis of college activity sent up to main campus and bound in a book, usually hard-bound. The oldest book was 1965-66, the newest that I've seen thus far is '98-99. I believe there are newer already in PDF format online on the local network. Apparently by scanning them and then coding an RDA record for each file, we can get them hosted by the state academic library organization, or somebody, for free.

So that's cool.

I'm using a fairly spiffy Fujitsu specialized document scanner that can scan two pages of a bound book in one pass, but I don't think their software is as good as they claim it to be. It can handle a pretty significant amount of curvature in the books - for example, I was scanning three pages starting at page 385 of 427, so LOTS of curve when you're that far in. I was holding up the left side to get the right page reasonably flat, then holding down both sides with one finger.

And yes, the fingers were captured by the scan.

After you've done your scan, you get into the next phase, where you drag this wire frame to line up one line down the spine between the two pages, then you align four corners to the outside corners of the pages. The program does a good job of detecting the edges and snapping to it, but sometimes you have to do some dragging to improve alignment. Once you've aligned all the scanned pages correctly, you click an Apply button and it re-cuts the scans into individual pages and flattens them, programmatically removing the curve. It does a very good job, though not perfect.

THEN you have to go back through every page and remove the fingertips! It has a special tool just for it and works a lot like Photoshop's patch tool, but it auto-selects the fingertip. Click Apply, and the fingertip vanishes.

Once you've removed the fingertips, you can save it to PDF. Theoretically the program performs OCR (optical character recognition), but I can't see that it has any effect. I end up loading the PDF into Acrobat Pro and running OCR there.

And this is where I learned something tonight. While you can't do a spell-check on a scanned document because you're dealing with a scanned image, not words, there's something that's similar: a fragment check. Fragments are words that Adobe Acrobat recognizes as 'I think this is a word or something, but I'm not sure, therefor I didn't map it into the OCR side of the document. Fix it.' Acrobat can't provide a dictionary of suggestions like Word, so when it sees something that it thinks was a word but it couldn't map, you have to type the correction. Or page number. Or budget number. Or tell it to ignore it.

It took me a good half an hour to fix a three page document. I don't know how many times I typed the San of San Juan. Just the San, apparently Juan was recognizable.

And that was a three page document from '67-68. The latest document from '98-99? That was 40some pages, I'm going to run a fragment check on it tomorrow afternoon and we shall see how long it takes to fix.

One very odd thing about scanning two pages at once in bound books - the page sequence is reversed! This is easily fixed in Acrobat Pro when you're dealing with a handful or two of pages, you just slide page thumbnails around. But dealing with 30 or 40 pages? Next week I'll try scanning a book starting with the last pages and working my way forward and seeing how that works.

So important tip when creating PDFs from scanned docs for public consumption: running OCR is only half the job. If you need the document to be searchable, you MUST spend the time to run a fragment check on it and fix all of the problems! Otherwise you're going to frustrate anyone needing to do anything serious with the document.

One thing that makes me really wish I had a working Mac laptop: I'd like to take an unfixed doc and run it through text to speech and see how it works. Then run the fixed doc through TTS. Might be interesting.

There's some pretty good stuff in this deal for $25, particularly the VPN and dupe finder. mSecure is a program that I've been using on my iPhone for pretty much as long as I've had one, and I've found it invaluable: it'll be nice to have a desktop version. And the PDF/OCR program sounds like it'll be quite useful with all of the medical records that I maintain. I'm not familiar with Acorn, it says it will open Photoshop PSD files, so it'll be worth some time for me to check it out.

Your mileage may vary.

And if you're not a Mac person, why are you bothering with this post? ;-)

https://www.macheist.com/sales/the-award-winning-black-november-mac-bundle-ft-acorn-6

I've been on a mission of late to purge a storage locker to eliminate (A) a bunch of crap that I don't want or need, and (ii) a monthly debt that we definitely don't need as I'm in my 14th month of being unemployed. To further get rid of clutter, and to get some files off of my wife's ancient Compaq desktop (Windows 98 anyone?), I ordered a Vantec IDE/SATA to USB 3 adapter from NewEgg for $20 with free shipping. That allowed me to check A LOT of hard drives that have been sitting around for files that I might be interested in. Only one, clearly labeled BAD, was not readable. Some had already been wiped. Unfortunately pretty much all of them are unusable: the smallest is an 800 MEGABYTE laptop drive (HUGE amount of space in DOS days), and aside from an old 4 TB drive from my previous iMac, the largest was only 8 gig. So I'll end up opening them up, stripping some of them for their magnets and platters because it's fun, and tossing the rest.

My wife's Compaq posed a different sort of problem. First, let it be proclaimed far and wide, that as a rule I HATE COMPAQ COMPUTERS! HP also falls under this broad proclamation. This goes back to the '80s when I first had to open them up and work in their guts. They're notorious for being fickle in their configuration and requiring that you buy components only from their makers. Well, this one is not much different. It's running Win 98, and I didn't want to try and put it on a network since the concept of trying to find network drivers for such an old OS, not to mention an OS CD!, was pretty much unthinkable. And I had just bought this spiffy Vantec adapter, so I figured I'd just remove the hard drive and suck it in to my iMac and copy the contents on to a USB stick for my wife.

Fat chance. First off, they secured the hard drive with screws on both sides. The motherboard is on the far side, so those screws are inaccessible. So remove the entire hard/flopy drive cage! They even secured THAT with screws on both sides! So without removing the motherboard, I can't get the damn hard drive out. I tried undoing the ribbon cable header and plugging in the Vantec adapter, but for reasons unknown that did not work: I used the Compaq itself to power the drive during that experiment. Now I'm going to grab my Windows 7 box and my router, plug both computers in to the router side-by-side, and get them talking to a local workgroup so I can just suck the files directly to the Win 7 computer. THEN I can copy the files to a USB stick. I couldn't even get the 98 machine to recognize a 256 meg USB stick without it wanting additional drivers!

Hopefully this will work. If not, I have an even older XP machine sitting in the corner that should boot.

But here's the clever bit.

I had an old 15" CRT VGA monitor sitting around, so a monitor for the Compaq was set. I was able to find a PS/2 keyboard in its original box, so that's set. Couldn't find a mouse. Not a big deal, I can navigate old Windows with a keyboard just fine, it's just easier with a mouse. But while cleaning out my storage shed, i found a full box of Belkin mice! I'm talking an actual factory box with something like 10 mice in it, all of them PS/2 or serial! I brought one home and plugged it in!

And it only moved the cursor sideways.

Being the geek that I am, and more than a little handy with a screwdriver, I took it apart.

The vertical sensor axle had popped out of its far side. Simply popped it back in to place, snapped the housing back together, popped the ball back in (yes, pre-optical mice), and it worked just fine. THEN I put the screw back in.

So for the first time in almost 35 years of working with IBM PCs, I fixed a mouse.

Now let's hope my little networking misadventure works. My previous wireless access point had the radio die, but the router side continues to work just fine, so I've kept it in service for that use as my Apple wireless router has only one user ethernet port.

(Tech lesson: the way that the original mice worked when they had the little rubber balls was that they had two sensors, X and Y axes, connected to rods that were in physical contact with the ball and rotated as you moved the mouse. Electronics in the mouse and software translated the rotation of the rods for the computer to move the mouse pointer on the screen correspondingly to the mouse movements. Very clever design. Then they went to optical mice, 'rubber eraser' pointers, and trackpads. Trackballs were just upside-down mice with billiard balls, nothing particularly innovative there. The rubber eraser pointers used strain transducers to sense where the pointer was being bent and how hard it was being pushed to provide mouse pointing information, trackpads use a similar strain transducer tech.)

Finally it has been decided. A long time ago in this galaxy, Lexmark filed a suit against a company called Impression who not only refilled Lexmark-brand toner cartridges, but Impression also jiggered with a chip that Lexmark built in to the cartridge. Lexmark claimed that this was a DMCA violation. Impression said that Lexmark lost its patent rights once the cartridge was sold as part of first sale doctrine, and finally the highest court in the land agreed.

The basic issue has been that all printer manufacturers have been selling printers at cut-rate prices, expecting to make huge profits on ink cartridges. To ensure this, they followed Lexmark's and HP's leads by putting microchips in the ink cartridges that told the printer that these were "Genuine" cartridges - accept no substitutes. Or if a substitute were to be found, bitch endlessly that a substitute was present and that a complete meltdown was imminent and that it was all the printer owner's fault for not using Genuine Ink or Toner Cartridges! And it was illegal, or at least a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, to break the code in the chip and spoof that the third-party refilled cartridges were original. Sometimes the printer would lie and say the third-party cartridge would exhaust quicker.

So it's all over, barring printer manufacturers buying more congressmen to change the laws to make it illegal again. We can not only legally get ink cartridges refilled, we can legally get the chips reset.

https://hothardware.com/news/us-supreme-court-protects-consumers-right-to-refill-ink-cartridges

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/05/30/171253/us-supreme-court-protects-consumers-right-to-refill-ink-cartridges-in-precedent-setting-lexmark-vs-impression-case

Excellent article by Bruce Schneier. "Last year, two Swiss artists programmed a Random Botnot Shopper, which every week would spend $100 in bitcoin to buy a random item from an anonymous Internet black market...all for an art project on display in Switzerland. It was a clever concept, except there was a problem. Most of the stuff the bot purchased was benign­ -- fake Diesel jeans, a baseball cap with a hidden camera, a stash can, a pair of Nike trainers -- but it also purchased ten ecstasy tablets and a fake Hungarian passport."

Artificial Intelligence has been getting a lot of press recently with Elon Musk and Bill Gates talking about the danger of AI running wild. They have some valid points, but I'm not too worried about it: how long does your Windows machine go without crashing? ;-) Anyway, there's no way to implement Asimov's Laws of Robotics, it's debatable if we'll ever have an AI along the likes seen in HAL or Terminator. But who knows.

But I have to wonder: what would a computer do with a fake Hungarian passport?

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/01/when_thinking_m.html

Well, it's a new wireless data transfer specification. 802.11 is the IEEE standard for "... is a set of physical layer standards for implementing wireless local area network (WLAN) computer communication in the 2.4, 3.6, 5 and 60 GHz frequency bands" (Wikipedia), and currently there are four finalized and approved standards: A, B, G, N (not in their order of approval). The latest is N, it was only finalized a couple of years ago.

Now wireless networking makers like Belkin, etc., are advertising AC networking! Isn't that wonderful! Well, not really. First off, AC is not yet an approved, codified, standard. So lots of people are working on it, and it's guaranteed that it will change before it gets approved. Which means any equipment that you buy now that supports AC may or may not work when the standard is finalized and approved. I personally don't like throwing out equipment if I can avoid it. Second, faster networking may or may not benefit you. There are numerous bottlenecks in networking and the internet, and the biggest bottleneck is totally out of your control: it starts where your router plugs in to the wall. Internally, maybe your router is a 10/100, which means it can handle both 10 megabit per second and 100 mb/s data transfer over a wired connection, and if it's a wireless router, maybe it's a 54 mb/s router. Wow!, you think, that's really fast! Well, yes and no. If you have two computers on your network moving large files back and forth, like ISO images or video files, then yes, faster routers and faster wireless specs can be beneficial. But the bottleneck is at the wall: when your router plugs in to the cable modem or DSL router or whatever, the speed on the other side of that device drops drastically. I get about 1.5 mb/s download from my ISP, I haven't seen faster than 8 mb/s in residential installations. So internally you can sling files around pretty fast, but once you hit the actual internet, you're back down to a crawl. It's still hugely faster than the fastest dial-up modems, but most won't appreciate the speed increase.

So unless you sling huge amounts of data around your internal network between connected computers, you're not going to appreciate much of a bonus there. Of course, you might be paying for a faster internet connection, but chances are you're still going to be slower than what your router can really crank out.

Why do I mention this? At Apple's annual World Wide Developer's Conference recently they announced including AC in their new line of laptops. I believe they also have a wireless router that's AC. But this, by itself, is not a selling point. I do think that Apple will have a good enough wireless card that it can be updated when the AC spec is finalized, whenever that is, but in and of itself AC is not sufficiently compelling to replace equipment at this time.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/06/802-11ac-apple-wwdc/

Talking with my oldest friend this morning via email, he mentioned that he's still running an accounting system that he wrote 25 years ago in FoxBase. I'm the one who turned him on to FB, which was the crux of the conversation. While writing my reply, I had the following observation:

"It's really amazing to look at my (messy) office: BluTooth keyboard and trackpad, magnetic-coupled power on my (closed) laptop, 23" LCD monitor, WiFi color laser printer, a telephone that has 64 gig of memory plus a video camera plus a still camera plus it plays music plus you can run pre-written programs on it, and two dead Palm Pilots. Plus a 3 terabyte external hard drive for backups. Talk about something that was absolutely and in all ways inconceivable 25 years ago.

I meant to add "This word I keep using, I think it means what I think it means." but forgot to.