t’s easy to imagine how small, ancient boats of old would steer through the seas - simply stick an oar in the water and let physics do the rest. But how does a behemoth passenger liner do it? How does one wrest such control (or in some cases, not) over such a significant machine of metal and wood?

If you look in a book on processor design, you’ll find a description of how registers can be created from static memory cells. However, the 386 illustrates that the implementation in a real processor is considerably more complicated. Instead of using one circuit, Intel used six different circuits for the registers in the 386.

But what if the USB connection could be made wirelessly? For a few years, real honest-to-goodness wireless USB devices were actually a thing. Competing standards led to market fracture and the technologies fizzled out relatively quickly in the marketplace, but like the parallel universe of FireWire hubs there was another parallel world of wireless USB devices, at least for a few years. As it happens, we now have a couple of them here, so it’s worth exploring what wireless USB was and what happened to it, how the competing standards worked (and how well), and if it would have helped.

Also with a detailed explanation of UWB.

The key basis technology instead was the concept of ultra wide-band, or UWB, which in modern parlance collectively refers to technologies allowing very weak, very wide-spectrum (in excess of 500MHz) signals to become a short range yet high bandwidth communications channel.

source: HN

But there is currently one smartphone that qualifies for a “Made in the USA” title from the FTC. It’s the Liberty Phone, which is made by a company called Purism. The phone is a version of Purism’s Librem 5. The Made-in-China Librem 5 costs $800, and the Liberty phone costs $2,000. It has 4 GB of memory, and reviewers say that its specs are pretty outdated. Not every single component in the Liberty Phone is made in the USA, but the company has been trying very hard to make it as American-made as possible.

source: HN

Today’s Tedium highlights ACCESS.bus, the would-be standard that wanted to be USB, but couldn’t stick the landing.

Also called the Inter-Integrated Circuit protocol, it’s used as a low-level way to communicate with peripherals, both in its original form and through its de facto successor, SMBus. Developed in the early 1980s by Philips Semiconductor, I²C may be one of the oldest things still in wide use in most modern computers beyond the x86 instruction set—and it is often key to adding driver support into operating systems.

We have long left ACCESS.bus, our would-be contender for the USB throne, into the dustbin of history, but DDC is still at the root of how both HDMI and DisplayPort communicate with our computers.

Do you ever feel like we aren’t getting the future we were promised, but we are getting the one we were threatened with.

The piece of equipment that the entire world has come to rely on—and she is specially trained to handle—is called an extreme ultraviolet lithography machine. It’s the machine that produces the most advanced microchips on the planet. It was built with scientific technologies that sound more like science fiction—breakthroughs so improbable that they were once dismissed as impossible. And it has transformed wafers of silicon into the engines of modern life.

She’s one of the engineers assigned to the fabrication plants—or fabs—where ASML customers manufacture their semiconductors. Hall is based here in Boise, the headquarters of Micron Technology, where I hopped into a bunny suit of my own and followed her inside the chip fab. Then I got a rare, behind-the-scenes peek at what might just be the most important machine ever made.

source: DF

GPS is perhaps one of the most audacious geo-engineering feats ever undertaken, and its traces can be felt with just an antenna and a motive.

All that said, it’s not as though there’s a cacophony of navigation data swarming around you, deafening if you could just hear it. In reality, the GPS signals surrounding you are astoundingly weak. To take an analogy: imagine a normal light bulb, like the one that might be above you now. Pull it twenty thousand kilometers away from the room you’re in, and have it flash, on, off, on, off, a million times a second. Imagine straining your eye to watch the shimmer of the bulb, two Earths away, and listen to what it’s telling you.

source: trivium

Today, I’d like to tell you about the Etak Navigator, a truly revolutionary product and the world’s first practical vehicle navigation system.

Back in 1985 you used paper maps to navigate, like this one from a Thomas Brother’s map of Los Angeles: A Thomas Brother’s Map. As you can see, the maps weren’t always pretty. By today’s standards it was also supremely difficult and tedious to find locations and even more difficult to work out how to get there. So, when the Etak Navigator launched, it was like something from the future.

source: HN

Each of the six floors of Building 41 is themed after a stage in the development of computing.

The 386 processor (1985) was Intel’s most complex processor at the time, with 285,000 transistors. Intel had scheduled 50 person-years to design the processor, but it was falling behind schedule. The design team decided to automate chunks of the layout, developing “automatic place and route” software. This was a risky decision since if the software couldn’t create a dense enough layout, the chip couldn’t be manufactured. But in the end, the 386 finished ahead of schedule, an almost unheard-of accomplishment.

In this article, I take a close look at the “standard cells” used in the 386, the logic blocks that were arranged and wired by software. Reverse-engineering these circuits shows how standard cells implement logic gates, latches, and other components with CMOS transistors. Modern integrated circuits still use standard cells, much smaller now, of course, but built from the same principles.

A viral car review by tech-reviewing’s biggest name highlights the all-too-common pitfalls of shipping before the firmware is ready.

The title doesn’t lie, and the answer is mildly cursed but par for the course. Something I didn’t mention is that this applies to almost all consoles released in the entire decade, and in fact a significant number (like the Colecovision) ONLY had RF out; the NES was one of the first consoles to have composite at all. If I could do it all again I’d mention that. I’d also keep my Casio CZ-1000 instead of throwing it away when I was 25.

Beneath the utilitarian purpose of computation, computing is also a source of delight and wonder. Software is not just databases and mail merges or SaaS and spreadsheets; it’s creative coding and simulated cities, code poetry and bulletin board systems. It’s websites that dazzle and iPhone apps that make the heart sing. And it’s sometimes even spreadsheets, coerced to dance and do all manner of weirdness. All of these approaches to computing are what am collecting here, and bundling under the term “garden of computational delights.” This is a list of places that collect or catalyze sources for being enraptured by the web, programming, and the wider world of computing. Or, as per Tim Hwang and Omar Rizwan, this is a garden of all the different places you might discover where “the computer is a feeling.”

source: Dfly

In 1969, Harry amazed everybody with a little electronic gadget he’d built which, using the primitive digital integrated circuits of the time, generated random music, played it through a speaker, and flashed lights on its front panel. It was precisely what people expected computers to do, based upon portrayals in the movies and on television, and yet it could be held in your hand and was, internally, very simple. He explained how it worked, and I immediately knew I had to have one. Digital electronics was in a great state of flux at the time, with each manufacturer launching their own line of integrated circuits, most incompatible with one another, so there was no point in slavishly reproducing Harry’s design. Starting from the concept, I designed my own gadget from scratch, using Signetics Utilogic diode-transistor small scale integration integrated circuits which were popular at the time but shortly thereafter made obsolete by 7400 series transistor-transistor logic (TTL). The architecture was identical to Harry’s device, but I opted for more with-it and less power-hungry light-emitting diodes (LEDs) for the display instead of the incandescent bulbs he used. I built the electronics assembly on a sheet of perforated board using wire-wrap fabrication (some people look down their noses at wire-wrap today, but it was good enough for the Apollo Guidance Computer and almost every mainframe backplane of the 1960s, and my wire-wrapped electronics works perfectly fifty years later.)

Little did I imagine, when designing and building the Mind Grenade hardware in 1969, that fifty years later I’d be emulating it on a computer which ran more than a thousand times faster than the one I used in my day job at the time and, furthermore, was sitting on my own desk. But here we are. Thanks to HTML5 and JavaScript, it is now possible to emulate the hardware Mind Grenade entirely in software that runs within any modern Web browser. Below is an abstracted version of the Mind Grenade front panel. Press the power button at the bottom to get things going. The slider at the left controls the pitch and the slider at the right sets the rate at which the notes play. The check boxes below the lights select any of the 16 possible tunes that can be played.

source: HN

In the world of modern portable devices, it may be hard to believe that merely a few decades ago the most convenient way to keep track of time was a mechanical watch. Unlike their quartz and smart siblings, mechanical watches can run without using any batteries or other electronic components.

Over the course of this article I’ll explain the workings of the mechanism seen in the demonstration below. You can drag the device around to change your viewing angle, and you can use the slider to peek at what’s going on inside:

The world’s strongest magnet is a million times stronger than Earth’s magnetic field.

A tour of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and its 45 Tesla magnet.

Still, its implications are wide-ranging. The court is basically saying that whoever presses the camera button owns the copyright, even if the button-pusher doesn’t own the equipment, the camera settings are provided to them, and they get some verbal direction from the camera owner/photo subject about when, where, and how to take the photo. Due to that conclusion, Shah does not own the copyrights to the photos on his phone and he can’t register the copyrights or enforce them.

Billed as the most secure phone on the planet, An0m became a viral sensation in the underworld. There was just one problem for anyone using it for criminal means: it was run by the police

source: HN