71–80 of 191 posts
Once upon a time, on USENET, someone had a .sig that predicted one day computers would be cheap enough they'd come in cereal boxes and we'd throw them away. That day appears to have arrived.
Another friend will give me a 180 gigabyte RAM device next week, cause it would go to the container otherwise...
Once upon a time, on USENET, someone had a .sig that predicted one day computers would be cheap enough they'd come in cereal boxes and we'd throw them away. That day appears to have arrived.
At least a decade ago, a major magazine had a disposable chip inside for... I don't remember why. Does anyone remember this?
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That happened way before. RFID cards for disposable public transportation tickets or those music greeting cards.
At a certain point it's more about the semantics of what a "computer" is. I don't know if I'd count an ASIC from a musical greeting card, though; and even within general purpose devices, microcontrollers vs microprocessors are typically delineated by the presence of an MMU.
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Not a myth. I clearly remember watching a YouTube video where this was discovered, only a few years ago, but of course the uselessness of search engines these days has made it impossible to find now.
Here is a May 2011 post of someone who discovered that: https://www.halloweenforum.com/threads/interesting-fact-abou... And here is someone who recorded audio samples (no idea of the year): https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Listen-to-Light/ Edit: and here is maybe the video you were remembering: a video from June 2011 of someone hooking a speaker to listen to the flickering led: https://youtu.be/753-lkao8l0?si=-Wq…
Update 20 Nov, 2009: This additional step was added on 20 Nov, 2009, about a 1+1/2 years after the bulk of this instructable was published.
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Not a myth. I clearly remember watching a YouTube video where this was discovered, only a few years ago, but of course the uselessness of search engines these days has made it impossible to find now.
Yeah I think I saw that too, bigclive maybe?
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At least a decade ago, a major magazine had a disposable chip inside for... I don't remember why. Does anyone remember this?
Esquire October 2008 e-ink cover?
My example was all the above except the chip was centerfold in the middle of the magazine. Not on the cover...
I'm surprised this happened more than once however.
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The worst offenders right now might be disposable vapes. I saw some sold with effing lcd screens built-in. For a disposable piece of crap.
I'm waiting for the EU to ban these fucking things already. That and disposable power banks. Yes, you read that right. Selling consumer devices with Li-Ion batteries that are designed to not be rechargeable, should be banned altogether.
Next up: "Porting Doom to run on an LED candle".
FWIW Doom was ported to the Ikea GU10 lightbulb a couple of years ago. Unfortunately the original post and code all got taken down due to copyright claims, but archive has a copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20210615035229/https://next-hack...
I love it. I have noted this article for my talk about how CPUs are free. To appreciate that, you have to understand that when the first microcomputers came out engineers were still in "compute" mode[1], we were lectured that you wouldn't use a hard coded loop to check for a switch closure, you had to use interrupts because otherwise you were wasting all those CPU clocks . And computing at the time was often billed i…
The irony is that the developments which made dirt-cheap MCUs possible have at the same time basically ruled this out.
Digital logic is almost trivial to scale down. With Moore's Law the compute core itself is indeed becoming basically free. However, IO does not scale down: modern chips have far fewer analog pins, far lower current limits, lower voltages, and are increasingly sensitive to ESD & over-voltage events.
An ATmega32u4 from 2008 is designed to operate on 5V, can handle 40mA per pin, and has 13 analog pins. It's rather sturdy and can take quite a beating. On the other hand, the RP2040 from 2022 runs on 1.1V, although IO is 3.3V. It can only handle 12mA per pin, which a chip total of 50mA. It has only 4 analog pins, which lack a lot of protection present on the digital pins. Basically, you'll damage it if you look at it funny.
I think it's best summarized by a somewhat-recent change in the USB 2.0 specification: originally the data pins were supposed to handle a 24-hour short to 5V without any issues. This requirement was dropped because such a short is incredibly rare in practice, and dropping that single requirement led to 16% reduction in silicon area for the transceiver and a 3x standby power reduction.
In today's world of ever-shrinking transistors, dealing with (relatively) high voltages and analog voltages is getting more and more expensive.
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The lithium in those cheap disposable things are less "lithium" and more "metallic powder/paste that theoretically contains elements of lithium." It's not something you'd want to actually use in anything important like a car battery
Not true. "Disposable" vapes use commodity li-ion cells, of the same basic type that you'd find in a cellphone, a laptop or an EV. They probably aren't the best quality, but there's nothing unusual about the chemistry or packaging. Li-ion cells are the preferred chemistry because of the very high discharge rate - alkaline or primary lithium cells just can't deliver enough current. The cell is perfectly capable of bei…
I don't understand this. Instead of plugging it into a charger, they'd rather go to the store to buy another, or more likely order online and wait for it to be delivered?