Month: June 2019

Enlarge / (Photo by TF-Images/TF-Images via Getty Images) (credit: getty images)

Over the weekend, Germany's auto regulator told Daimler that it would have to recall 42,000 Mercedes-Benz diesel vehicles after the group discovered illegal software on the cars that would reduce the effectiveness of the emissions-control system.

Daimler said Sunday night that it would take a one-time charge of hundreds of millions of euros against the upcoming quarter's earnings to deal with the new accusations, but it disputed the government regulator's determination that the software in question was illegal. According to the Wall Street Journal, Daimler plans to formally object to the claims.

The accusation against the German automaker is similar to accusations lobbed against Volkswagen Group starting in 2015. The US Environmental Protection Agency accused VW Group of including illegal software on its diesel vehicles to ensure that the diesels would pass emissions limits imposed by the US. Ultimately, VW Group ended up spending tens of billions of dollars on regulatory fines and vehicle buybacks in the US and the EU.

The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B has launched. It's a pretty big upgrade from the Raspberry Pi 3, with the company claiming that the device can provide "desktop performance comparable to entry-level x86 PC systems."

OK... but how does it perform as a server? Individually, the answer is just about what you'd expect. While the Pi 4B is an enormous all-around upgrade from the 3B+, it's still a Raspberry Pi at its heart. The former model's DDR2 RAM has been upgraded to DDR4, the new Cortex A72 CPU is anywhere from double to quadruple the speed of the older A53, and the gigabit Ethernet adapter isn't hamstrung by a USB 2.0 bus anymore, so it can actually push a gigabit worth of traffic. This is fantastic for a starting-at-$35, passively-cooled bittybox... but it's still very anemic compared to, for example, a humble i3-8100T.

Sysbench CPU is a decent metric for estimating real-world performance. Data drawn from Tom's Hardware for the Rpi 4B and from OpenBenchmarking.org for the Intel i3-8100T. (credit: Jim Salter)

But where you can't scale up, you can scale out—and that's precisely what www.raspberrypi.org has done. The launch site for the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B is mostly running on a cluster of 18 of the little devices themselves. Fourteen handle PHP code execution, two serve static files, and two run memcached. CloudFlare is still handling the brunt of the raw network traffic, though, and the database—by far the heaviest storage load on a WordPress site—isn't running on the little Pi cluster, either.

Enlarge / Last Defender standing: Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter) ponders what it means to be a hero in the final season. (credit: YouTube/Netflix)

Jessica Jones makes its final bow with an imperfect but ultimately powerful and thought-provoking third season. The series finale—canceled before it even started streaming, along with the rest of the Marvel/Netflix Defenders series—expertly explored conflicting notions of justice, the possibility of forgiveness and redemption, and what it really means to be a hero through the lens of Jessica's fractured relationship with her adoptive sister, Trish Walker.

(Spoilers for all three seasons below.)

Along with the first season of Daredevil in 2015, Jessica Jones helped launch the Defenders shared universe on Netflix to broad critical acclaim. The show earned praise for its gritty noir tone (perfectly captured in the main title sequence), complex characters (shout-out to Carrie-Ann Moss's Emmy-worthy turn as Jeri Hogarth), and unapologetically frank depiction of a woman struggling with PTSD in the wake of an abusive relationship. It's hands-down my favorite of the Defenders series, although Daredevil's arch-villain Wilson Fisk will always hold a special place in my esteem.

Enlarge / Diversion canals channel water into earth-bottomed infiltration canals like this one, where water can begin to soak into the ground on its way to a pond or basin. (credit: Musuq Briceño, CONDESAN, 2012.)

Rain seldom falls on the desert lowlands of coastal Peru, so people in the area have always depended on the water that flows down from the Andes during the rainy season. But streams in this part of the world come and go quickly, so indigenous people built a system of canals and ponds to channel excess rainwater and create groundwater. Now a group of researchers says that a scaled-up version could help improve Peru’s water management.

Ancient engineers (not aliens)

1,400 years ago, Chavin and Wari indigenous communities on the slopes of the Andes Mountains dug systems of stone-lined and earthen canals to channel excess rainwater from streams to areas where the ground could soak up more of the water. From there, the water gradually trickled through sediment and cracks in the rock until it reached springs downslope. “Water is stored in the soils and travels much slower beneath the surface than it would as overland flow,” Boris Ochoa-Tocachi, a civil engineer at Imperial College London, told Ars Technica. Water that would otherwise have been lost to flooding feeds springs that remain active even into the dry season.

Today, most of these once-widespread canals—called amunas in the Quechua language—lie abandoned or clogged. But in a few rural communities, like Huamantanga in the central Andes, people have used and maintained parts of the ancient amunas for centuries. 11 of the original canals still operate, feeding 65 active springs and 14 small ponds.