If there’s one thing that probably unites the entire La-Tech community, it’s generational love. We live to be informed about the latest developments before anyone else, and it’s likely that for many of them, we all have a pretty smart concept. how they work. But if there’s one thing that probably bothers many of us the most, it’s when we see the new generation being misused. Many of us are open source enthusiasts, not because we oppose advertising profits, but because we have noticed the effects of monopolistic practices that distort the market position with their new technologies and make things worse rather than better. After all, if a new generation is able to make the world a greater position in some way, what’s the point?
It’s depressing, then, to see the same cycle repeated over and over again, to see new technologies used in the service of restrictive practices for short-term profit instead of making better products. We probably all have examples of new high-tech products. that are simply bad, belong to the new generation just because of the marketing and in the end offer something worse than what existed before, but with more bling-bling. Perhaps worst is the helplessness of watching gullible members of the public drink anything new and shiny that you know is flawed and not be able to do anything about it.
But here at The-Technology, maybe I can do something about it. I don’t sit in any main convention hall, but I have a platform here to stand on, and from there I can communicate with you, other people whose paintings take you to many desirable corners of the tech industry and beyond. If I believe that new technologies are being used irresponsibly to create bad products, I can at least code how that can be changed. So here are my 4 regulations for responsibly new technologies, each with a few examples. They deserve everyone to be obvious, and I hope you’ll agree with me. Continue reading “Some Reasonable Rules for the Responsible Use of New Technologies” →
There have probably been times when a company hasn’t provided support for one of your devices for as long as you want, whether it’s a smart speaker or a phone, but what if you have a medical implant that’s no longer compatible?Liam Drew] has taken an in-depth look at what the failure of several neurotech startups means for patients with their devices.
Recent advances in electronics and neurology have led to new treatments for neurological disorders with implantable devices such as the Autonomic Technologies (ATI) implant to control cluster headaches. Now that the company has gone bankrupt, users are left with their own devices trying to hack into the system. device to increase its lifespan or resort to prescription drugs that do not do the job and directly exploit the nervous system. Since removing deceased implants is expensive (up to $40,000!) and carries the same old list of dangers related to surgery, many patients have chosen to keep their implants non-functional. Continue reading “What Happens When Implants Are Suspended?” →
A footnote in this week’s tech news came from Linus Torvalds, as he floated the concept of removing support for the Intel 80486 architecture in a post on the Linux kernel mailing list. It is not surprising that an old and little-used architecture can be abandoned. , it’s been a decade since the same fate befell the first Linux platform, the 80386. Line 486 may have long since died on the desk, but it hasn’t completely disappeared from the integrated area and remains a crowd favorite. of retrocomputers, it’s worth taking a minute to consider the conceivable consequences of this move.
The Intel 80486 was released in 1989 and was a particularly advanced edition of its earlier 80386 line of 32-bit microprocessors with on-chip cache, more effective channeling, and a built-in math coprocessor. It had a 32-bit space capacity, although in practice the RAM and motherboard limitations of the 1990s meant that a typical 486 formula would have RAM in megathroughtes. There were a variety of editions with clock speeds ranging from 16 MHz to 100 MHz throughout its lifespan, as well as a lower-end “SX” variety with the coprocessor disabled. It would have been preferred as a processor to run Windows 3. 1 and remained a competent platform for Windows 95, but by the late ’90s its days on the desktop were over. Intel continued its line of embedded processors into the 2000s and finally ended operations in 2007. The story of the 486 was not over, as many competitors had produced their own edition of the 486 throughout its active lifespan. Non-Intel 486 chips have outlived the originals and even today, in 2022, more than one company makes 486-compatible devices. RDC produces a line of RISC SoCs running 486 code and, according to ZF Micro’s online page Solutions, they still have a finished SoC from the Cyrix 486 line. There is some confusion online about whether DM&P’s Vortex86 line is also a derivative of the 486, however, they are descendants of Rise Technology’s Pentium clone. Continue reading “Goodthroughe Linux at 486. Will we miss you? » →
If you were blind, having a synthetic retinal implant would be the difference between seeing a few hundred pixels in grayscale and seeing all the time in black. Imagine stepping out of this total darkness, enjoying a few years of mobility and your new senses, and everything is going dark since then because the company that makes the devices has abandoned them for economic reasons.
It’s a poignant story about proximity generation and how a medical device based on proprietary hardware and software necessarily holds its users hostage to the monetary well-being of the company that produces it. When that company is a reckless startup, aiming to make money moving away from retinal implants and toward direct cortical stimulation (a generation that is now more productive in its infancy) is a risky bet. But those were other people who had no choice, and the generation is, or was, incredible.
A blind implant recipient may or may not have brain cancer, but says they can’t get an MRI because Second Sight doesn’t reveal the main details about their implant. Those bugs in your eyes? When the company laid off its rehabilitation therapists, patients were told they would no longer receive software updates.
If we were CEO of SecondSight, we know what we’d do with our software and hardware shut down right now. The company is facing bankruptcy, has lost significant credibility in the medical device industry, and will move away from the Argus formula anyway. They have little to lose and much goodwill to gain by allowing other people to fix their own eyes.
Thanks to [Adrian], [Ben], [MLewis] and a few other tipsters for this one!
Times are a-changin’. In the past, no home was complete without a drawer filled with a collection of batteries of other sizes and types; However, nowadays, more and more of our devices use built-in rechargeable batteries. Probably this is an improvement or not, it’s still up for debate. The fact is, some of those old batteries are getting harder and harder to locate over time.
That’s why [Arsenault] needs to keep as many as possible. Not in some sort of physical drum museum (although that sounds like the kind of position you’d like to visit), but digitally in the form of 3D models and spec sheets. . The concept is that if you want something new, for example the PRAM battery for a Macintosh SE/30, you can design your own relocation with a published case.
The brilliantly named Battery Backups task is lately taking the form of Thingiverse Group, which allows other alkaline hobbyists to send their own digitized cells. The cells that [Stephen] modeled not only come with STL files for 3D printing, but also CAD source files in various other versions so you can import them into the tool of your choice.
Like efforts to digitally maintain old input devices, it’s not immediately clear how many others are willing to spend their afternoons modeling replaced batteries. But then again, we’ve long since learned not to underestimate the hacker’s hard-to-understand interests. community.
There’s something satisfying and sad about seeing an aging artist who used to be a sellout now playing at a local bar or casino. That’s how we feel when we look at [Craig’s] sleek bubble memory construction. I’d rather finish this task than you came up with 4 decades ago and [Craig] turns out to be on the right track to make it happen.
If you don’t remember, bubble memory would completely wipe out the hard drive industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s. As a byproduct of research on torsion memory, the generation relied on tiny magnetic domain names or bubbles that circulated in a thin film. They traveled to the edge of the film where they were reproduced by a magnetic sensor. A writing head then placed them back on the other side to continue their journey. It looked a lot like the old delay line memories, but with small magnetic domain names. instead of voltage waves passing through the mercury.
We don’t know where [Craig] got his Intel 7110, but they’re very expensive in those days because of their rarity. In some cases, it’s less expensive to buy hardware that uses bubble memory and borrow devices from the card. I can tell [Craig] to go through the whole board very carefully.
As they were back in the day, the chips have extra loops and would map faulty loops. Since bubble memory isn’t volatile, this deserves to be a one-time factory setup. However, if you lose the card, the same information appears on the chip label. [Craig’s] first check was to read the card and compare it to the label posted on the chip. They match, so it’s a smart signal that the chip is in intelligent working order and that the circuit is at least capable of reading.
We’ve already talked about bubble memory like many other garage bureaucracies that have disappeared. Some military programs have taken advantage of the non-mechanical nature of aircraft and that’s why the Navy’s NEETS program has a section on them.
[Ben Cox] discovered some attractive USB devices on eBay. The Epiphan VGA2USB LR accepts VGA video on one end and presents it as a USB webcam-like video signal on the other. Won’t you want to pull out a VGA monitor again?! The devices are old, discontinued hardware, but they claim to be compatible with Linux, so a BUY button is overwritten later and [Ben] waited patiently for them in the mail.
But when they arrived, the devices weren’t indexed as USB UVC video devices as expected. The vfinishor has a traditional engine, which ended with Linux 4. 9, meaning none of [Ben’s] machines would run it. By now, [Ben] was curious about how it all worked and started researching, with the purpose of creating a driving force in user space for the device. He succeeded, and in the same detail as always, [Ben] explains not only the procedure he followed to fix the problem, but also how those devices (and their engine) work. Scroll to the bottom of the tasks page for the overview, but it’s worth reading in its entirety.
The resulting driver isn’t optimized, but it will run at around 7fps. [Ben] even installed a small internet server inside the controller to provide an undeniable interface for video in the blink of an eye. You can even save your output to a video file, which is incredibly convenient. The code is in your GitHub repository, so check it out and maybe head over to eBay to do your own hunt for discounted prices.