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Who Really Invented the Thumb Drive?

Cars That Think

Personal computers in the late 1980s began incorporating CD-ROM drives, but initially these could read only from prerecorded disks and could not store user-generated data. Computer users badly needed a cheap, high-capacity, reliable, portable storage device. Flash memory became cheap and robust enough for consumer use by 1995.

Singapore 144
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Inventing Postscript, the Tech That Took the Pain out of Printing

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Back then, Warnock already had a rough idea how to “Print Anything.” It would have been quite different had Warnock and company not been in the right place at the right time to meet the right person. And the right person was Apple founder Steven Jobs, who invented the first, hoped for the second, and told Adobe to tough out the third.

Design 104
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For Better or Worse, Tesla Bot Is Exactly What We Expected

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I do want to set some expectations with respect to our Optimus robot… Last year was just a person in a robot suit, but we’ve come a long way, and compared to that, it’s going to be very impressive.” It’s not a given that it’ll work that way, but it’s a good idea, potentially a big advantage. Tesla These quotes are all from Musk. “I

Tesla 131
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IEEE Spectrum’s Top Telecom Stories of 2023

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Can We Identify a Person From Their Voice? In the same way that a person’s unique fingerprints can be used to identify them, the idea with voiceprinting is that, given a recording, the same can be done with a person’s voice. And he’s got some ideas for how to make that happen.

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The Sneaky Standard

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Personal computing has changed a lot in the past four decades, and one of the biggest changes, perhaps the most unheralded, comes down to compatibility. Ebbing demand for personal computers has slowed innovation in advanced PCs. And some are as cheap as high-end PCs. Intel’s chips face another challenge, too. Thunderbolt.

Standards 121
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How a Parachute Accident Helped Jump-start Augmented Reality

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Adjusted for inflation, they cost about US $8,000 and weren’t even a thousandth as fast as a cheap gaming computer today. I thought I could move far beyond simple crosshairs and text on a flat plane to create virtual objects that could be spatially registered to real objects in an ordinary environment.

Parts 135
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Creating the Commodore 64: The Engineers’ Story

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We were fresh out of ideas for whatever chips the rest of the world might want us to do,” said Charpentier, “So we decided to produce state-of-the-art video and sound chips for the world’s next great video game.” They then packed as many of those ideas as they could into a predefined area of silicon. “Al It’s a personal challenge.

Engine 114