Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
PlasMa simulates a complete mini/mainframe system in a self-contained desktop-sized box with real lights and switches. The system is comprised of a simulated ‘mini-like’ processor with a small amount of main memory, and simulated ‘mainframe-like’ peripherals such as a paper tape reader and punch, mag tapes, exchangeable disks and an operators console.
The processor is ‘micro-coded’ and can run (currently) 3 different instruction sets; two based on the Princeton TOY architecture with 2K words memory for educational use, and a more advanced home-grown ISA based on NICE, with 64K words memory and floating point.
The simulation runs on an ATmega2560 MCU which also controls the user-interface comprising approx 540 LEDs, 100 switches, 6 SD-cards for the storage peripherals, LCD screen, keypad, speaker, Centronics interface for a dot-matrix printer, PS/2 interface for a qwerty keyboard… and a MIDI in & out interface for fun.
See the video below and more on hackaday.io.
Enlarge / Human driver will continue to be a job at the Boring Company Las Vegas Loop for the foreseeable future. (credit: PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Image)
Autonomous driving capabilities are a central component of Tesla's stratospheric share price, with CEO Elon Musk repeatedly telling investors that they're the difference between "being worth a lot of money or worth basically zero." But real-world performance on the road lags far behind Musk's claims, with the latest data point coming from another Musk venture, the Boring Company, and its tunnels under Las Vegas.
The Boring Company might be Elon Musk's strangest side hustle. Whether it was sparked by a desire to avoid traffic commuting to SpaceX or part of an insidious plan to undermine rail projects, the results for the sewer-sized tunnels have been about what you'd expect: Proposed tunnels between Washington DC and Baltimore, underneath I-405 in Los Angeles, and from Chicago to its major airport remain literal pipe dreams.
So far, there's just a 2.2-mile loop with three stations serving the Las Vegas Convention Center, albeit with the potential to expand the subterranean system to 68 miles (110 km) in total.
Longtime NSA-watcher James Bamford has a long article on the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).