Author: Blaze Woodard
Blaze Woodard, an editor at cubox-i.com, is presently working as an intern at a Silicon Valley technology company while majoring in politics at the University of Kansas. Blaze, who identifies as both a policy thinker and a self-described tech geek, offers a viewpoint on hardware and computing coverage that few editors in this field can match: the capacity to relate the workings of a circuit board to the larger political, regulatory, and social forces influencing the technology sector. Even though her academic path led her to political science, her early fascination with technology persisted. She writes about computing, AI, and hardware with the zeal of someone who truly loves the subject, not as someone assigned to cover it. Blaze plays soccer and spends her free time with friends and living her life, which is exactly what a college student should do outside of the office and newsroom.
When you read Apple’s own description of Private Cloud Compute, the first thing you notice is how different it sounds from Apple. Almost overnight, the company that is known for keeping quiet about its supply chain has begun discussing server boards, tamper switches, and high-resolution imaging in a manner more akin to that of a defense contractor than a consumer electronics company. Something seems to have changed on the inside. It’s evident in the language. Naturally, the system itself is concealed. Apple won’t reveal the locations of the data centers, display the racks, or identify the individuals using clipboards to…
When a small hardware company places something genuinely strange on a table at a trade show, you notice a certain kind of excitement. Engineers bend over. Phones emerge. It’s easy to understand why the CuBox-M, a new two-inch cube from Israel-based SolidRun, has been receiving such attention. It appears to be a paperweight. It uses models for machine learning. Although SolidRun isn’t well-known, the company has been discreetly supplying specialized hardware for years in the field of single-board computers and embedded systems. The CuBox line has been around for more than ten years, and this newest model gives the impression…
The hum in practically every data center nowadays is the same as it was a decade ago. The faint smell of warm electronics, blinking LEDs, and cold air. What’s actually operating inside those metal racks has changed. An IT manager in 2005 would have responded with a disorganized assortment of Unix variants, Windows NT offshoots, and a tiny but expanding portion of Linux when asked which operating system drove the server industry. That discussion is largely resolved today. Linux is in charge. Even though the numbers are never flawless, they generally present a consistent picture. Depending on which methodology you…
The same low hum can be heard whether you enter a data center in Ashburn, Frankfurt, or Singapore. Blue lights blinking in patterns that no one really pays attention to anymore, rows of servers, and cold air forced through metal cages. Almost all of those machines are running programs written in C. Not with JavaScript. Not in Python. Not the languages that developers quarrel about every other week on Twitter. C. A language that is older than the majority of engineers who use it. InformationDetailsTopicMost Used Programming Language for Server Operating SystemsDominant LanguageC (with growing Rust adoption since 2022)Year of…
At tech meetups, there’s a specific type of conversation that takes place around the second beer when someone asks which Linux distribution is worth using these days. Ubuntu is always mentioned. There’s always someone who disagrees. The table falls silent for a moment when a more reserved person brings up Debian because no one wants to acknowledge that they’ve been considering switching back. In actuality, the Linux desktop, which was once dismissed as a hobbyist’s playground, has evolved into something nearly dull, and that’s the best thing you can say about an operating system. The three distributions that have supported…
In the early 1970s, a college computer lab would have looked more like a furnace room than an office. Men wearing short-sleeved shirts and wide ties attended to the entire setup, which included refrigerator-sized cabinets humming against the walls and vents expelling warm air. Before breakfast, a single machine could fill a hall, require its own cooling system, and still not be able to handle what a modern phone can. It’s difficult to ignore how swiftly that world vanished. During that time, the supercomputer was the main event. Soft-spoken engineer Seymour Cray, who liked to work alone in a basement…
When you first hold the CuBox-M, you experience a unique kind of pleasure. It feels substantial in your palm, much like a die from a board game, but it’s small enough that you have to constantly check to make sure you’re holding the correct object. Each side is two inches. That’s all. Somehow, a quad-core processor, a neural engine capable of 2.3 trillion operations per second, and sufficient connectivity to run a small office are all located inside. Unbeknownst to most, SolidRun, an Israeli company that has been producing small computers in secret for years, has been in this business…
The CuBox-i4Pro has an almost unyielding quality. It is a tiny, dark cube that is hardly wider than a stack of business cards that sits on a desk like an afterthought, but as soon as you plug it in, you realize it isn’t attempting to be cute. It’s attempting to be helpful. This distinction is more important than it might seem. The Israeli company behind it, SolidRun, has been discreetly shipping these cubes for years, gaining a small but devoted following among security researchers, hobbyists, and those who spend their weekends with a soldering iron. The top model in the…
The Raspberry Pi has an almost endearing quality. Nothing happens when you unpack it, hold the small green board in your hand, and plug in a power cable. When you first use these boards, you might not realize how reliant they are on the tiny plastic square that slides into the back. The Pi is just a paperweight with HDMI ports if it doesn’t have an SD card with an operating system. That’s what most novices overlook. The simple part is the hardware. Even though it’s small, the actual work is done on a laptop somewhere with a card reader…