PCIMAX3000+ is a computer card that will change the way you either do radio or listen to your MP3’s or other audio via PC. It will effectively change your PC into a powerfull broadcast worthy stereo FM radio station, it is a small digital FM transmitter in a form of a PC card. You will be able to play your audio files (CD, wav, MP3, real audio etc.) from your PC through radio waves directly to your household radio receiver in the next room, in the living room, across your yard, in whole block of flats….or for the entire village/small city. You need just an ordinary radio receiver to receive your signal. The included software lets you set the frequency and the output power.

The original Mac was written in Pascal and assembly, though not natively. They had to use a cross-platform development system called the Macintosh Development System, compiling on one machine and transmitting the binary to the target (via a serial connection) for execution and testing. Very similar in concept to hardware-testing software on iOS. //

The Lisa/Lisa 2 supported this kind of cross-platform development, but it was too expensive for most developers. The environment sold to developers comprised two Mac 128s. When the 512 came out, it became possible to code natively. Two or three applications were available by late 1984 that allowed users to write and run simple interpretive code: Microsoft Basic, Turbo Pascal, and a Mac version of Apple Pascal that didn't seem to materialize past the demo stage.

The lack of a good, cheap development system probably contributed to the exodus of developers--especially game developers--from the Mac to the PC. It wasn't until the Mac Plus came out in 1986 that it was a truly comfortable environment to code in. Two years wasted. Oh, well.

According to Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, it wasn’t a lack of trying that took down DEC. It was the inflexibility of the business model they had so long relied upon:

“Digital Equipment Corp. had microprocessor technology, but its business model could not profitably sell a computer for less than $50,000. The technology trapped in a high-cost business model had no impact on the world, and in fact, the world ultimately killed Digital. But IBM Corp., with the very same processors at its disposal, set up a different business model in Florida that could make money at a $2,000 price point and 20% gross margins—and changed the world.”

Unique real-time face generator

The future is here. You can create a unique person with your parameters in one click.

When I was a teenager, I had a CD player in my room, and I used to listen to fairy tales to fall asleep. The narrator’s voice would relax me and I’d fall asleep quickly. Fast forward to yesterday, I was playing with Google Text-To-Speech for an unrelated project, and had gotten one of their code samples to generate some speech for me. I had also played around with OpenAI’s GPT-3, which I had found wonderfully surrealist, and it had stuck in my mind, so I thought I should combine the two and create a podcast of nonsensical stories that you could listen to to help you fall asleep more easily.

Having already played with Google’s speech synthesis, I thought it would be pretty quick and easy to create this, as all I’d have to do is generate some text with GPT-3 and have Google speak it. Half an hour later, I had an AI-generated logo, AI-generated soundscapy background music, an AI-generated fairytale, and an AI-narrated audio file. A day later, I have seven:

The Deep Dreams podcast.
https://deepdreams.stavros.io/

Images are just too big. A 3 MB bitmap compresses down to a 500 KB JPEG, which, don’t get me wrong, 16% of the original size is great, but why 500 KB? That’s still pretty large.

This is 2022, we shouldn’t have to put up with large images. Our websites might load 60 MB of stuff for a pageview, but that stuff shouldn’t be images, it should be Javascript, as Brendan Eich intended.

We shouldn’t have to put up with fat images, but, until now, we had no choice.

Now we do.

The solution

a computer compressing data, by Caspar David Friedrich, matte painting trending on artstation HQ

A week or so ago, Stable Diffusion was released, and the world went crazy, and for good reason. Stable Diffusion, if you haven’t heard, is a new AI that generates realistic images from a text prompt. You basically give it a description of the image you want, and it generates it.

Now, this alone would be revolutionary, but we got double the revolution this time: This thing can also take an image and tell you the prompt you can use to generate it.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

That’s right, why compress an image to 500 KB when you can compress it to 50 bytes, where the bytes are the prompt that can be used to generate the exact same image again?

You wouldn’t, of course not.

Instead, what you would do, is ask the image-describing AI to describe the image, take the resulting (very small) prompt, transmit it over the wire, where the recipient would then use it to generate the image again based on the prompt.

I call this technique STAV, or Stable Transcription and Artistic Validation. Yes, the acronym might not contain any of the words “image”, “compression”, “reconstruction”, or “diffusion”, but Philip Katzip isn’t going to be the only one giving his name to compression techniques. //

As you can see, there is basically no loss in quality, even though the images’s sizes are around a ten-thousandth the original’s. This is an absolutely astonishing result, and will definitely herald a new era of compression. There are even some cases where quality is better than the original, and it is astonishing for a compressor to achieve 100%+ quality.

There are some minor kinks that need to be worked out, such as the fact that each image takes around a day to generate on mobile, but this is more than acceptable in certain domains. Website visitors, for example, are well-accustomed to such loading times, and would barely notice any difference.

AI image synthesis goes open source, with big implications. //

Realistic image synthesis models are potentially dangerous for reasons already mentioned, such as the creation of propaganda or misinformation, tampering with history, accelerating political division, enabling character attacks and impersonation, and destroying the legal value of photo or video evidence. In the AI-powered future, how will we know if any remotely produced piece of media came from an actual camera, or if we are actually communicating with a real human? On these questions, Mostaque is broadly hopeful. "There will be new verification systems in place, and open releases like this will shift the public debate and development of these tools," he said.

That's easier said than done, of course. But it's also easy to be scared of new things. Despite our best efforts, it's difficult to know exactly how image synthesis and other AI-powered technologies will affect us on a societal scale without seeing them in wide use. Ultimately, humanity will adapt, even if our cultural frameworks end up changing radically in the process. It's happened before, which is why the Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus reportedly said, "the only constant is change."

In fact, there's a photo of him saying that now, thanks to Stable Diffusion.

Welcome to Screen-Free Parenting. Becoming a mother led me to start this site back in 2016 to help parents, doctors, and other caregivers tackle the challenge of raising a child in today’s tech-heavy world.

Since 2016, a lot has changed and the pandemic has forced rapid adoption of tech by many families that were otherwise very thoughtful about screen time.

We’re here to help. Since our inception we have been scouring academic publications and written hundreds of articles to help you make smart choices and advocate for the children. Over the years this site has gotten deep with research results and helpful, fun parenting tips.

This positive journey has led me to write my book Spoiled Right: Delaying Screen Time and Giving Children What They Really Need, and develop an old-fashioned family board game called Starting Lines.

Middle-earth has seen more than its share of trials and challenges, but perhaps none more pressing today than a lack of mechanical keyboards that any of its various peoples can actually read. For ages, everyone from elves to dwarves had to make do with keyboards carrying legends of unknown languages. Today, keyboard and audio brand Drop released two prebuilt mechanical keyboards to rule them all—or at least speakers of Elvish and Dwarvish.

The Drop + The Lord of the Rings Dwarvish and Elvish Keyboards ($169) are the first to gain official Lord of the Rings licensing, Drop said in its announcement today. The keyboards build on Drop's November release of The Lord of the Rings keycap sets, also written in Elvish and Dwarvish, and follow Drop's Lord of the Rings artisan keycaps made from resin.

Drop's new prebuilt keyboards target people who want a keyboard J.R.R. Tolkien would be proud of but don't necessarily want to go on a Tolkien-style epic journey to build their own.

Drop's Elvish keyboard has legends written in actual translations of the Tolkien-created languages of Sindarin Elvish and, for the modifier keys, Tengwar, the form of Elvish found in that oh-so-special ring. //

{Comments:}
Ten keys to bring the numbers together
And on the right side of the keyboard bind them //

If there isn't super nerd pedantry going on in the comments of a Lord of the Rings article, you know something is seriously wrong with the world. Or half of Ars' readers disappeared. //

https://drop.com/buy/drop-the-lord-of-the-rings-mt3-elvish-keycap-set?defaultSelectionIds=964667

Software containers are taking modern business and broadcast infrastructure to the next level. Register for upcoming industry-leading learning sessions or view past sessions on-demand. Designed to educate and empower broadcast engineers, Container University is your hub to learn about this proven reliable technology and hear how it’s exactly right for broadcast operations.

Graybeards know compiler technology is much more complex than simple go/no-go code parsing. In the 70-odd years since Grace Hopper brought compilers into existence, every milestone in processor design has been blessed or cursed by compiler advances or the lack of them. Itanium died because Intel couldn't make the compiler fly. Arm prospered because its compilers made its performance available.

Only compilers can unify the market: C wouldn't be more than a footnote if its compiler technology wasn't easy to port to multiple platforms. Conversely, compilers can divide the market. Think of the 1980s with multiple monolithic C compilers trying to lock products into platforms by making porting painful. They weren't very good, they weren't very compatible, life was slower and harder than it needed to be.

It is hard to overstate the difference that GCC made to that environment. Compilers can be split into three components: a front end, an optimizer, and a back end. The front end takes your code and digests it into a form the optimizer can then arrange according to rules, and the back end translates that output into the right object format for the target system. GCC liberated this structure, so if you wanted to write a new language, you just had to worry about the front end. A new target instruction set, just the back end. A particular cache structure, hit the optimizer. The benefits are shared with everyone.

That's where the true magic of compilerdom lies. You can have the world's most thoughtfully designed language, but if your compiler makes slow code, nobody will care. With GCC, you got the same kit of parts as everyone else and you could concentrate on what makes your language or processor special. When GCC stopped being the GNU C Compiler and became the GNU Compiler Collection, the economics and scope of compilers skyrocketed, and systems innovation followed them into orbit.

Then LLVM went a step further, and broke compiler technology into a set of libraries, meaning that some of the things compilers do very well, as in optimally managing data structures and parsing complex commands, can be added into databases and browsers and all manner of applications. Sure, languages are cool, but a complete architectural component model is cooler. Do you want magic in a bottle or to badly reinvent the wheel?

It helped popularize the interactive computing paradigm we take for granted today.

The history of computing could arguably be divided into three eras: that of mainframes, minicomputers, and microcomputers. Minicomputers provided an important bridge between the first mainframes and the ubiquitous micros of today. This is the story of the PDP-11, the most influential and successful minicomputer ever.

Over the decades, corporations and Madison Avenue have used this event as a significant launching pad for exposure, dropping fortunes on reserving time during the game, spending exorbitant amounts on productions, and hiring top-flight Hollywood directors to helm their 60-second epics. But, this was not always the case with the Super Bowl, and we can trace this advertising furor to a specific moment in history. It was 1984.

That was the year that Apple Computers caused a sensation with a cinematic minute that was jarring, arresting, transformative, and — most important — successful. The company wanted to distinguish itself in a marketplace dominated by a titan, and parlayed the timing of a literary classic to deliver a commercial that delivered the goods. Apple’s “1984” to this day is recognized as an advertising classic, and became the very revolutionary spot that altered the parameters of the Super Bowl.

And it very nearly never happened. //

The commercial has gone on to become regarded as one of the greatest of all time. In a move of cagey self-interest, Chiat/Day ran the commercial themselves weeks earlier, in a solitary local market in Idaho. This was done in order to have the commercial qualify for that year’s advertising awards. “1984” won every award it was nominated for, and it went on later to be declared the best commercial of the decade. To this day, it is regarded as one of the classics to ever run on television.

As perhaps its second-greatest accomplishment (after successfully selling the Apple Macintosh as an important computing breakthrough), the spot launched the elevated importance placed on Super Bowl advertising. It is commonplace today for corporations to invest heavily in their presentations on this day, sometimes spending an entire year gearing up for the event.

How SAGE jumpstarted today’s technology and built IBM into a powerhouse. //

IBM had recently entered the computing realm in the early 1950s, and it was already dominant in punch-card tabulating. With its emphasis on research and development and customer support, IBM was chosen by the Air Force in 1953 to design and construct the AN/FSQ-7 systems. While the project contributed about 10 percent to IBM’s bottom line for several years, the real benefit to IBM was access to the advanced designs at MIT and to revolutionary technologies such as core memory. As the SAGE project wound down, IBM engineers used their accumulated skills and applied them to the newer commercial offerings for years afterward.

While flying on airlines today has its own unique set of hassles, actually booking a flight is (relatively) painless. This wasn’t so in the 1950s, when schedulers went through racks of index cards, each with a particular flight’s info, all stored in what resembled a library card catalog. Only a few schedulers could fit around the card catalogs, and making a flight reservation could take an hour or two. Through a chance encounter, an IBM executive met the president of American Airlines, and they discussed how the airline needs paralleled the capabilities of SAGE. Recognizing the competitive advantages of a computerized reservation system, American contracted with IBM to develop SABRE. SABRE quickly became a huge success and through multiple corporate reorganizations now operates now as Travelocity and Expedia.

The Kyoto University in Japan has lost about 77TB of research data due to an error in the backup system of its Hewlett-Packard supercomputer.

The incident occurred between December 14 and 16, 2021, and resulted in 34 million files from 14 research groups being wiped from the system and the backup file. //

At the moment, the backup process has been stopped. To prevent data loss from happening again, the university has scraped the backup system and plans to apply improvements and re-introduce it in January 2022.

The plan is to also keep incremental backups - which cover files that have been changed since the last backup happened - in addition to full backup mirrors.

But wait, should we believe it?

An artificial intelligence warning AI researchers about the dangers of AI sounds like the setup of a delightful B movie, but truth is often stranger than fiction.

A professor and a fellow at the University of Oxford came face to face with that reality when they invited an AI to participate in a debate at the Oxford Union on, you guessed it, the ethics of AI. Specifically, as Dr. Alex Connock and Professor Andrew Stephen explain in the Conversation, the prompt was "This house believes that AI will never be ethical." The AI, it seems, agreed. //

So what should we make of this apparent warning from the silicon realm? Thankfully, not too much. That's because the AI also argued the counterpoint: "AI will be ethical."

"When I look at the way the tech world is going, I see a clear path to a future where AI is used to create something that is better than the best human beings," it continued.

The machines, it would appear, aren't ready to take over quite yet.

Peripherals were part of system that launched Minuteman III missiles in the '80s.

The Large Scale Systems Museum (“LSSM”) is a public museum in New Kensington, PA (just outside Pittsburgh) that showcases the history of computing and information processing technology. “Large Scale” means our primary focus is on minicomputers, mainframes, and supercomputers, but we have broad coverage of nearly all areas of computing, large and small, dating back to the 1950s.

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LSSM is a real physical museum that you can visit, not an “online” or “virtual” museum. We are a living museum, with computer systems restored, configured, and operable for demonstrations, education, research, or “re-living the old days”. Our staff of volunteers comprises a number of experienced engineers and technicians who are highly experienced with these systems, painstakingly restoring them and maintaining them in like-new condition.

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If this sounds odd to you, think of an antique car collector with an old Corvette or a Model-T Ford. But cars only revolutionized transportation, while computers have revolutionized everything, including cars! Every aspect of our lives involves computers in some way.

Even in our ubiquitous mobile phones, from the latest smartphones to the humble flip-phone. There's at least one computer inside each one, making everything work. Every aspect of its operation, from recognizing button presses to identifying itself to cell towers, is controlled by a computer.

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Our bank accounts, our car maintenance, our baby pictures, all handled by computers to make our day to day lives easier. Are you old enough to remember when it took days or weeks for one doctor to receive your medical records from another? Now it takes seconds. Remember when we had to take checks to the bank to deposit them? Not anymore, and all of this great functionality that depend upon came from somewhere.

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The history of computing is rich and full of great stories, breakthroughs, successes, failures, and strong personalities, all culminating in the device that you're reading this website on right now. Everything we have today came from somewhere, and we teach that history here at LSSM. From aesthetics to internals to real-world uses and operation, we preserve it all.

Today I will write about silent fanless FreeBSD desktop or server computer … or NAS … or you name it, it can have multiple purposes. It also very low power solution, which also means that it will not overheat. Silent means no fans at all, even for the PSU. The format of the system should also be brought to minimum, so Mini-ITX seems best solution here.

Looking for an elite performance PC that you offers the best in silent computing? Our QuietElite™ PCs feature the top-of-line quiet PCs, on the cutting-edge for performance, compared to any PC available.