The Hunt For MH370 Goes On With Barnacles As A Lead

April 22, 2024 by Lewin Day 43 Comments

On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished. The crash site was never found, nor was the plane. It remains one of the most perplexing aviation mysteries in history. In the years since the crash, investigators have looked into everything from ocean currents to obscure radio phenomena to try and locate the plane. All have thus far failed to find the wreckage.

It was on July 2015 when a flaperon from the aircraft washed up on Réunion Island. It was the first piece of wreckage found, and it was hoped it could provide clues to the airliner’s final resting place. While it’s yet to reveal a final answer as to the aircraft’s fate, some of the ocean life living on it could help investigators need to find the plane. The picture is murky right now, but in an investigation where details are scarce, every little clue helps.

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A standard-compliant MXM card installed into a laptop, without heatsink

MXM: Powerful, Misused, Hackable

April 18, 2024 by Arya Voronova 28 Comments

Today, we’ll look into yet another standard in the embedded space: MXM. It stands for “Mobile PCI Express Module”, and is basically intended as a GPU interface for laptops with PCIe, but there’s way more to it – it can work for any high-power high-throughput PCIe device, with a fair few DisplayPort links if you need them!

You will see MXM sockets in older generations of laptops, barebones desktop PCs, servers, and even automotive computers – certain generations of Tesla cars used to ship with MXM-socketed Nvidia GPUs! Given that GPUs are in vogue today, it pays to know how you can get one in low-profile form-factor and avoid putting a giant desktop GPU inside your device.

I only had a passing knowledge of the MXM standard until a bit ago, but my friend, [WifiCable], has been playing with it for a fair bit now. On a long Discord call, she guided me through all the cool things we should know about the MXM standard, its history, compatibility woes, and hackability potential. I’ve summed all of it up into this article – let’s take a look!

This article has been written based on info that [WifiCable] has given me, and, it’s also certainly not the last one where I interview a hacker and condense their knowledge into a writeup. If you are interested, let’s chat!

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VCF East 2024 Was Bigger And Better Than Ever

April 17, 2024 by Tom Nardi 16 Comments

I knew something had changed before I even paid for my ticket to this year’s Vintage Computer Festival East at the InfoAge Science and History Museum in Wall, New Jersey.

Over the last couple of years, attendance has been growing to the point that parking in the lot directly next to the main entrance has been reserved for only the earliest of risers. That hasn’t described yours truly since the days when I still had what my wife refers to as a “real job”, so that’s meant parking in the overflow lot down the road and walking the half a mile or so back to the main gate. Penance for working on the Internet, let’s call it.

But this time, while walking along the fence that surrounds the sprawling InfoAge campus, I came across an open gate and a volunteer selling tickets. When commenting to her that this was a pleasant surprise compared to the march I’d anticipated, she responded that there had been so many people trying to get into the main entrance that morning that they decided to station her out here to handle the overflow.

I was a few steps past her table and into InfoAge before the implications of this interaction really hit me. Two entrances. How many attendees does there need to be before you setup a secondary ticket booth out by the reserve parking lot just to keep things moving smoothly? Well, I can’t tell you what the exact number is. But after spending the rest of the day walking between all the buildings it took to contain all of the exhibits, talks, and activities this year, I can tell you it’s however many people came to VCF East 2024.

Compared to its relatively humble beginnings, it’s incredible to see what this event has grown into. InfoAge was packed to the rafters, and despite what you might think about a festival celebrating decades old computing hardware, there were plenty of young faces in the crowd. I’m not sure exactly what’s changed, but the whole place was positively jumping. Perhaps it’s partially the generational nostalgia that’s kept Netflix cranking out new seasons of the 1980’s set Stranger Things. I’m sure attention (and attendance) from several well known YouTube personalities have played a big part as well.

Whatever the magic formula that’s turned what was once a somewhat somber retrospective on early desktop computers into a major destination for tech lovers, I’m all for it. Love Live the Vintage Computer Festival!

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Microsoft Killed My Favorite Keyboard, And I’m Mad About It

April 16, 2024 by Lewin Day 74 Comments

As a professional writer, I rack up thousands of words a day. Too many in fact, to the point where it hurts my brain. To ease this burden, I choose my tools carefully to minimize obstructions as the words pour from my mind, spilling through my fingers on their way to the screen.

That’s a long-winded way of saying I’m pretty persnickety about my keyboard. Now, I’ve found out my favorite model has been discontinued, and I’ll never again know the pleasure of typing on its delicate keys. And I’m mad about it. Real mad. Because I shouldn’t be in this position to begin with!

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Remembering Peter Higgs And The Gravity Of His Contributions To Physics

April 15, 2024 by Maya Posch 9 Comments

There are probably very few people on this globe who at some point in time haven’t heard the term ‘Higgs Boson’ zip past, along with the term ‘God Particle’. As during the 2010s the scientists at CERN were trying to find evidence for the existence of this scalar boson and with it evidence for the existence of the Higgs field that according to the Standard Model gives mass to gauge bosons like photons, this effort got communicated in the international media and elsewhere in a variety of ways.

Along with this media frenzy, the physicist after whom the Higgs boson was named also gained more fame, despite Peter Higgs already having been a well-known presence in the scientific community for decades by that time until his retirement in 1996. With Peter Higgs’ recent death after a brief illness at the age of 94, we are saying farewell to one of the big names in physics. Even if not a household name like Einstein and Stephen Hawking, the photogenic hunt for the Higgs boson ended up highlighting a story that began in the 1960s with a series of papers.

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Chandra X-ray Observatory Threatened By Budget Cuts

April 10, 2024 by Tom Nardi 39 Comments

Launched aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia in July of 1999, the Chandra X-ray Observatory is the most capable space telescope of its kind. As of this writing, the spacecraft is in good health and is returning valuable scientific data. It’s currently in an orbit that extends at its highest point to nearly one-third the distance to the Moon, which gives it an ideal vantage point from which to make its observations, and won’t reenter the Earth’s atmosphere for hundreds if not thousands of years.

Yet despite this rosy report card, Chandra’s future is anything but certain. Faced with the impossible task of funding all of its scientific missions with the relative pittance they’re allocated from the federal government, NASA has signaled its intent to wind down the space telescope’s operations over the next several years. According to their latest budget request, the agency wants to slash the program’s $41 million budget nearly in half for 2026. Funding would remain stable at that point for the next two years, but in 2029, the money set aside for Chandra would be dropped to just $5.2 million.

Drastically reducing Chandra’s budget by the end of the decade wouldn’t be so unexpected if its successor was due to come online in a similar time frame. Indeed, it would almost be expected. But despite being considered a high scientific priority, the x-ray observatory intended to replace Chandra isn’t even off the drawing board yet. The 2019 concept study report for what NASA is currently calling the Lynx X-ray Observatory estimates a launch date in the mid-2030s at the absolute earliest, pointing out that several of the key components of the proposed telescope still need several years of development before they’ll reach the necessary Technology Readiness Level (TRL) for such a high profile mission.

With its replacement for this uniquely capable space telescope decades away even by the most optimistic of estimates, the potential early retirement of the Chandra X-ray Observatory has many researchers concerned about the gap it will leave in our ability to study the cosmos.

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In A Twist, Humans Take Jobs From AI

April 9, 2024 by Al Williams 41 Comments

Back in the 1970s, Rockwell had an ad that proudly proclaimed: “The best electronic brains are still human.” They weren’t wrong. Computers are great and amazing, but — for now — seemingly simple tasks for humans are out of reach for computers. That’s changing, of course, but computers are still not good at tasks that require a little judgment. Suppose you have a website where people can post things for sale, including pictures. Good luck finding a computer that can reliably reject items that appear to be illegal or from a business instead of an individual. Most people could easily do that with a far greater success rate than a computer. Even more so than a reasonable-sized computer.

Earlier this month, we reported on Amazon stepping away from the “just walk out” shopping approach. You know, where you just grab what you want and walk out and they bill your credit card without a checkout line. As part of the shutdown, they revealed that 70% of the transactions required some human intervention which means that a team of 1,000 people were behind the amazing technology.

Humans in the Loop

That’s nothing new. Amazon even has a service called Mechanical Turk that lets you connect with people willing to earn a penny a picture, for example, to identify a picture as pornographic or “not a car” or any other task you really need a human to do. While some workers make up to $6 an hour handling tasks, the average worker makes a mere $2 an hour, according to reports. (See the video below to see how little you can make!) The name comes from an infamous 200-year-old chess-playing “robot.” It played chess as well as a human because it was really a human hiding inside of it.

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