Weekend tech reading: Remembering the MOS Technology 6502 CPU, Razer seeks $600 million...

Matthew DeCarlo

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Chip hall of fame: MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor When one particular chubby-faced geek stuck one particular chip into one particular computer circuit board and booted it up, the universe skipped a beat. The geek was Steve Wozniak, the computer was the Apple I, and the chip was the 6502, an 8-bit microprocessor developed by MOS Technology. The chip, and its variants went on to become the main brains of ridiculously seminal computers like the Apple II, the Commodore PET, the Commodore 64, and the BBC Micro, not to mention game systems like the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Atari 2600... IEEE Spectrum

Gaming firm Razer seeks to raise over $600M in Hong Kong IPO Gaming firm Razer has filed to go public through an IPO in Hong Kong as it looks to raise more than $600 million to go after growth opportunities. The U.S.-based company, which traces its origins back to Singapore, filed initial paperworkon Friday. Certain details — such as how much Razer is looking to raise, its valuation and the timing of the IPO — are not disclosed in the 345-page filing, but a source close to the company confirms it’s likely to be upwards of $600 million... TechCrunch

London Met Police's 18,000 Windows XP PCs is a disaster waiting to happen The majority of PCs used by the London Metropolitan Police are still running Windows XP, which has been completely unsupported since 2014. The London Metropolitan Police are still using around 18,000 PCs powered by Windows XP which truly is a horrifying number. The police force has already started upgrading its PCs from Windows XP — but rather than upgrading to Windows 10, the force is upgrading the PCs to Windows 8.1 instead... MSPoweruser

John Romero’s Doom II floppy disks sell for over $3,000 If you want to play the original version of Doom II, the game will set you back just $1.24 during the current Steam sale. If you want a boxed copy of the original floppy disk version, circa 1994, there's a copy available on eBay right now for $75. But if you want Doom II floppy disks that were once owned (and potentially signed) by Doom co-creator John Romero, you'll need to pay over $3,000. Ars Technica

Steam review bombing is working, and Chinese players are a powerful new voice In early April, just a month and a half after it released on consoles and two weeks after it launched on Steam, action-RPG Nier: Automata passed a million sales. Despite a few performance issues on PC, Nier launched to acclaim and racked up thousands of positive reviews. It was the surprise hit of the year until PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, and a wonderful success for quirky director Yoko Taro (whose previous few games combined likely sold less than Automata did in a month). And then, on April 28, this happened: PC Gamer

Inside Uber’s unsettling alliance with some of New York’s shadiest car dealers Geovanie Rosario signed the lease because it was easy. Tower Auto Mall came recommended by Uber, as one of four dealers the ride-hailing company partnered with in New York City to offer “flexible and affordable” rentals and lease-to-own contracts to drivers. Rosario went to see Tower one morning in May 2016 and started driving a black Lincoln MKS, New York City’s standard car-service vehicle, a week later. Quartz

How PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds emerged from the messy history of survival shooters After 20-something hours of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, my Steam recommendations are a wasteland. I've sunk a meaningful amount of time into a game with the words 'early access', 'survival', and 'shooter' in its tag cloud, and Valve's algorithm knows something about those. The earliest manifestations of that 'what if DayZ but dinosaurs' phenomena occupy three slots in a row in my 'you may also like' queue; an age gate indicates that we've arrived in 'what if DayZ but penises'. Zombies fill the gaps. Eurogamer

Manned multirotor -- first flight! First manned flight with this aircraft. 162kg TOW total flying time was 8 minutes, which turned out to be 57% of the battery capacity. This means that the craft has a theoretical flight time of 14 minutes 100%DoD. 11min 10s until you are down to 80%DoD. My assessment is that 10minutes is the real safe flight time capability with the 35kg LiPo that are currently mounted on the craft. Overall the test went really well. AmazingDIYProjects

Delivering billions of messages exactly once The single requirement of all data pipelines is that they cannot lose data. Data can usually be delayed or re-ordered–but never dropped. To satisfy this requirement, most distributed systems guarantee at-least-once delivery. The techniques to achieve at-least-once delivery typically amount to: “retry, retry, retry”. You never consider a message ‘delivered’ until you receive a firm acknowledgement from the consumer. Segment

The life, death, and legacy of iPhone jailbreaking The window shades are halfway down, leaving the bedroom dim. It's a grim day in Bassano del Grappa, a town in northeastern Italy that's mostly famous for its main import, the liquor of the same name: Grappa. I'm sitting on a twin bed—the only place I could sit. To my left, there's a bookshelf with a stack of Mickey Mouse comics, a staple in the childhood bedroom of every Italian kid. Motherboard.Vice

Researchers found they could hack entire wind farms On a sunny day last summer, in the middle of a vast cornfield somewhere in the large, windy middle of America, two researchers from the University of Tulsa stepped into an oven-hot, elevator-sized chamber within the base of a 300-foot-tall wind turbine. They’d picked the simple pin-and-tumbler lock on the turbine’s metal door in less than a minute and opened the unsecured server closet inside. Wired

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You think britian is bad. I'm pretty sure the city of la is still on ibm mainframe for it's police system. It's called ibm's cics, customer information control system, and the (like an os subsystem) software was written in britain. Their applications are called necs, written in mainframe assembler, and the cia uses this. I heard they use gmail tho. Ibm is very upward compatible; very little conversion is required to replace mainframe cpus and it's done by ibm.
 
The infamous 6502 ..... I don't think I was more impressed until they rolled out the 8088, which is still in use today as the "brains" of a few automobile systems. I guess it just shows that when properly applied, you don't need the latest and greatest to get the job done ...... if only my kids would learn that lesson!
 
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