Although digital computers are – much like their human computer counterparts – about performing calculations, another crucial element is that of memory. After all, you need to fetch values from somewhere and store them afterwards. Sometimes values need to be stored for long periods of time, making memory one of the most important elements, yet also one of the most difficult ones. Back in the 1950s the storage options were especially limited, with a 1959 Bell Labs film reel that [Connections Museum] digitized running through the bleeding edge of 1950s storage technology.

After running through the basics of binary representation and the difference between sequential and random access methods, we’re first taking a look at punch cards, which can be read at a blistering 200 cards/minute, before moving onto punched tape, which comes in a variety of shapes to fit different applications.

Electromechanical storage in the form of relays are popular in e.g. telephone exchanges, as they’re very fast. These use two-out-of-five code to represent the phone numbers and corresponding five relay packs, allowing the crossbar switch to be properly configured.

After these types of memory, we move on to magnetic memory, in the form of well-known magnetic tape that provide mass storage in relatively little space. There is also the magnetic drum, which is much like a very short and very fast tape and provides e.g. working memory. This is what e.g. the Bendix G-15 uses for its clock signal and working memory, while magnetic tape and punched tape are used for application and data storage.

Next we cover magnetic-core memory, which stores a magnetic orientation in its ferrite rings or on a ferrite plate. This is non-volatile memory, but has low bit density and performs destructive reads, preventing its use beyond the 1970s. Today’s NAND Flash memory has significant overlap with core memory in its operating principles, both in its advantages and disadvantages.

An interesting variation on core memory is Twistor memory, which saw brief use during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Invented by Bell Labs, it was supposed to make for cheaper core-like memory, but semiconductor memory wiped out its business case, along with the similar bubble memory. An interesting feature of Twistor memory was the ability to add write-inhibit cards containing permanent magnets.

Fascinatingly, a kind of crude mask ROM is also demonstrated, before we move on to the old chestnut of vacuum tubes. Demonstrated is a barrier-grid tube, which uses electrons to create an electrostatic charge on a mica surface. This electron beam is also used to read the value, which is naturally destructive, making it somewhat similar to core memory in its speed and functionality.

Finally, we get the flying-spot store system, which is a type of optical digital memory. This is reminiscent of optical disc systems like the Compact Disc, and a reminder of all the amazing breakthroughs that we’d be seeing over the next decades.

Perhaps the best part about this video is that it shows the world as it sidled still mostly unaware towards these big changes. Memory storage was still the realm of largely hand-assembled, macro-sized devices, vacuum tubes and chunky electromechanical relays. Only a few years after this video was released, we’d see semiconductor technology turn the macro into micro, by the 1970s nerds would be fighting over who had the most RAM in their home computers, and CD-ROMs would set the world of computer storage and home game consoles ablaze by the 1990s with literally hundreds of MBs of storage per very cheap disc.

We’ve tested oodles of noise-canceling headphones and the Sony WH-CH720N might have an unfortunate name, but they’re the best budget-friendly pair we’ve tried. They usually offer good value when selling for the full $178 MSRP, but right now they’ve fallen to $95 shipped on Amazon and $100 on Best Buy.

These headphones are well-built and well-designed, with great active noise cancellation and robust sound. They don’t fold up and they don’t come with a case, but you can get a case as a separate purchase if that’s a deal-breaker for you.

These are lightweight, with adaptive sound that can adjust itself to suit your environment. Moreover, if you want a pair of over-hear wireless headphones with active noise cancellation, it’s very difficult to get that in a package this affordable. Tack on the long-lasting 35-hour battery, and paying under $100 becomes a no-brainer if you’re in the market and on a tight budget. We haven’t seen them drop this low in price before.

We’re nowhere near a shopping event like Amazon Prime Day or Black Friday, but this is just one of several headphone deals we’ve spotted recently. Check those stories out if you’re on the hunt for wireless gaming earbuds or open earbuds.

If you’re interested in extraterrestrial life, these past few years have given an embarrassment of places to look, even in our own solar system. Mars has been an obvious choice since before the Space Age; in the orbit of Jupiter, Europa’s oceans have been of interest since Voyager’s day; the geysers of Enceladus give Saturn two moons of interest, if you count the possibility of a methane-based chemistry on Titan. Even faraway Neptune’s giant moon Triton probably has an ocean layer deep inside. Now the planet Uranus is getting in on the act, offering its moon Miranda for consideration in a kinda-recent study in the Planetary Science Journal.

Even if you’re into astronomy, it may seem like this is coming out of left field. “Miranda, really? What new data could we possibly have on a moon of Neptune nobody’s visited since the 1980s?” Well, none, really. This study relies on reexamining the data collected during the Voyager 2 encounter and trying to make sense of the chaotic, icy world that the space probe revealed.

The faults and other features on Miranda indicated it was geologically active at some point; this study tries to recreate the moon’s history through computer modelling to find that Miranda probably had a ≥100 km thick ocean sometime in the last 100-500 million years, and that while some of it has likely frozen since, tidal heating could very well keep a layer of liquid water within the moon’s interior. Since the moon itself is only 470 km (290 mi) in diameter, a 100km deep ocean layer would actually be a huge proportion of its volume.

Right now, the over-optimistic thinking is that “water means life”, since that’s how it seems to work on Earth. It remains to be seen if Miranda, or indeed any of the icy moons, ever evolved so much as a microbe. Aside from the supposed presence of liquid dihydrogen monoxide, there’s nothing to suggest they have. Finding out is going to take a while: even with boots — er, robots — on the ground, Mars isn’t giving up that secret easily. Still, if we’re able to discover irrefutable evidence for such extraterrestrial life, it will provide an important constraint on one term of The Drake Equation: what fraction of worlds develop life. That by itself won’t tell us “are we alone,” but it will be interesting.

Of course, even if all these worlds are barren now, they might not be for long, once our probes start visiting.

Story via Earth.com

Header image: Miranda, imaged by Voyager 2. Credit NASA/JPL-Caltech

Microsoft announced a major gaming shakeup on Friday, with Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer departing the company, along with Xbox President Sarah Bond.

Spencer will be replaced by former Instacart and Meta executive Asha Sharma. With Sharma’s most recent role as the president of Microsoft’s CoreAI product, these moves suggest that Microsoft might be doubling down on bringing AI into video games.

The company had already been experimenting with ways to combine AI and gaming, for example developing an AI gaming companion and releasing a buggy, AI-generated level from “Quake II.” 

Indeed, in an internal memo published by The Verge, Sharma wrote that Microsoft “will invent new business models and new ways to play” and said that “monetization and AI” will both “evolve and influence this future.” At the same time, she said that the company “will not chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop.”

“Games are and always will be art, crafted by humans, and created with the most innovative technology provided by us,” Sharma added.

That’s just one of three “commitments” Sharma made in her memo. The others involve building “great games beloved by players” and prioritizing Xbox.

Wikipedia editors have decided to remove all links to Archive.today, a web archiving service that they said has been linked to more than 695,000 times across the online encyclopedia.

Archive.today — which also operates under several other domain names, including archive.is and archive.ph — is perhaps most widely used to access content that’s otherwise inaccessible behind paywalls. That also makes it useful as a source for Wikipedia citations.

However, according to the Wikipedia discussion page about this topic, “There is consensus to immediately deprecate archive.today, and, as soon as practicable, add it to the spam blacklist […] and to forthwith remove all links to it.” (Ars Technica first reported on the decision.)

The discussion page says that Archive.today was previously blacklisted in 2013, only to be removed from the blacklist in 2016.

Why reverse course again? Because, the discussion page says, “Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users’ computers to run a DDoS attack.” Plus, “evidence has been presented that archive.today’s operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable.”

The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in question was allegedly directed at blogger Jani Patokallio. Patokallio wrote that beginning on January 11, users who loaded the archive’s CAPTCHA page have been unknowingly loading and executing JavaScript that sends a search request to his Gyrovague blog, in an apparent attempt to get Patokallio’s attention and increase his hosting bill.

Back in 2023, Patokallio published a blog post examining Archive.today, whose ownership he described as “an opaque mystery.” And while he wasn’t able to track down a specific owner, he concluded the site was likely “a one-person labor of love, operated by a Russian of considerable talent and access to Europe.”

More recently, Patokallio said the webmaster at Archive.today asked him to take the post down for two or three months.

“I do not mind the post, but the issue is: journos from mainstream media (Heise, Verge, etc) cherry-pick just a couple of words from your blog, and then construct very different narratives having your post the only citable source; then they cite each other and produce a shitty result to present for a wide audience,” the webmaster said, according to emails shared by Patokallio.

Patokallio said that after he declined to take the post down, the webmaster responded with “an increasingly unhinged series of threats.”

Wikipedia editors also pointed to webpage snapshots in Archive.today that appeared to have been altered to insert Patokallio’s name — hence the concern that it’s become “unreliable” as an archive.

Wikipedia’s guidance now calls for editors to remove links to Archive.today and related sites, replacing them with links to the original source or to other archives like the Wayback Machine.

On a blog linked from the Archive.today website, the site’s apparent owner wrote that Archive.today’s value to Wikipedia was “not about paywalls” but rather “the ability to offload copyright issues.” They later wrote that things had turned out “pretty well” and said they would “scale down the ‘DDoS’.”

“Why didn’t you write about such events earlier, folks of the tabloids?” they said. “I don’t expect you to write anything good, because then who would read you, but there was plenty of dramas, wasn’t there? Because there was no Jani to nudge you?”

These athletes here have reminded a lot of people that Americans are good people. Americans are kind people. And Americans stand up for the little guy and they stand up for their communities and they speak out because those are rights that Americans are given.

You watch the news and see what the current administration is saying and doing and it’s really awful. It’s fucked-up shit. I don’t even think that what these people are saying is political. They’re talking about things that are happening in their own communities.

And some of them have faced backlash for speaking out. Amber Glenn said she got “a scary amount of hate/threats.” Vice President JD Vance and President Trump have responded to some of the athletes who’ve made comments. They seem to be putting themselves out there, and the echo chamber seems even louder than it was a few years ago.

One hundred percent. This is 100 times louder than it was during the first Trump administration. It sometimes feels scary to say something, because it feels like there might be repercussions. They’re targeting people, and they’re sending people away without due process. So it’s even more important to speak out now. It’s also scarier.

I don’t want to take too much of your time, but I do want to end on perhaps a lighter note. Have you been watching Heated Rivalry?

I have all the time in the world to talk about Heated Rivalry.

Then by all means, go ahead.

I wasn’t watching it when everybody was really into it at first. Finally, it was like maybe the second or third week it was out and I was like, “OK, now I have to watch it.” People really built up how smutty it was. I was like, “I’ve definitely seen this on a different Netflix show before.”

Right?

There was a lot of sex in the first few episodes. By the time we got to maybe the fourth or fifth episode, I understood why there was so much sex, because like you had to just know all the heat-of-the-moment stuff. Because that fifth episode was one of the best episodes of TV I’ve ever seen.

Yeah, it was really good.

With the kiss on the ice, and then as soon as I thought the episode was amazing, Ilya calls Shane and says, “I’m going to …”

“I’m coming to the cottage”!

That was when I was like, “Oh my God.” It’s just amazing. The performances were great. I think that’s why it transcended. I loved it.

And now we have a new group of fans getting into hockey.

Stuff like that is amazing for sports as long as the sport embraces those kinds of shows, and it feels like they really want to. Sports really should be for everybody.