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United Airlines briefly grounded its fleet of brand-new Airbus A321neo planes, according to a report by Gizmodo. This had nothing to do with safety, as was the case with that recent Boeing controversy. Rather, it was due to the aircraft running afoul of a 1990 regulation regarding “no smoking” signs.

The 1990 ruling mandates that “no smoking” signs found on aircraft must be manually operated by the crew. The newly-designed Airbus A321neo features software that automatically displays the signage during a flight, so the crew doesn’t switch it on and off. That’s pretty much it. Meanwhile, smoking itself was fully banned from both domestic and international flights nearly 25 years ago.

Automated signage systems are not new. Many air travel companies bypass the 1990 regulation by applying for an exemption with the Federal Aviation Authority. United filed for this exemption on behalf of its entire fleet back in 2020, which was granted. There’s just one problem. The company’s Airbus A321neo is so new that it doesn’t fall under the protection of that exemption. These planes just started flying the friendly skies two months ago.

United is seeking permission from the FAA to add the Airbus A321neo to the pre-existing exemption. The federal agency has given United permission to fly its fleet of A321neos, five in all, while evaluating this request.

“As the FAA noted, this is not a safety of flight issue. Our five A321neos were briefly out of service on Monday while we worked through this issue with the FAA, resulting in a handful of delays but no cancellations as we swapped that flying to other aircraft types in an effort to minimize disruption for our customers,” United wrote in a statement.

There’s just one question left to ask. It costs around $130 million to manufacture just one A321neo aircraft, so United spent $650 million to make this fleet. That’s a whole lot of cheddar, so why didn’t it get this exemption stuff sorted before the company started booking flights?

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/united-airlines-grounds-airbus-a321neo-fleet-over-antiquated-no-smoking-sign-law-173652417.html?src=rss 

Some imaginative and resourceful game preservationists have reverse-engineered a long-lost F-Zero game from the mid-90s. Eurogamer reports that faithful recreations of two BS F-Zero Grand Prix games, broadcast exclusively for Nintendo’s long-defunct Satellaview satellite gaming extension for the Super Famicom, are now available to play for free as add-ons for the original ROMs.

The two BS F-Zero Grand Prix games — which added 10 courses, four new vehicles and a ghosting feature unavailable in the SNES / Super Famicom original — were broadcast exclusively for Nintendo’s Satellaview in 1996 and 1997. Satellaview was the Mario maker’s experimental satellite module for the Super Famicom in Japan. It never launched in the US or anywhere else globally.

Titles for the system had an ephemeral nature. First, players in Japan needed the right equipment, including the Super Famicom console, the Satellaview module (attached to the console’s bottom), a dedicated BS-X recording cartridge, a satellite dish and a receiver. They then had to tune in at specific times and download the games onto their special cartridges.

Although the system didn’t last long (Satellaview had shuttered by 2000), the console’s setup was a rough precursor to the downloaded digital gaming content we’re accustomed to today.

Given those strict requirements, it’s no wonder the sci-fi racers’ original ROMs appear (so far) lost to history. Fortunately, someone with the handle kukun kun, with apparent access to the original games, uploaded BS F-Zero gameplay videos (embedded below) to YouTube in 2018. Using those clips as a blueprint, the team of talented developers / archivists — led by a person with the handle ROMHacker GuyPerfect — reconstructed the BS F-Zero courses with a combination of game analysis software, original F-Zero assets and custom art.

The project used a modified version of Graphite, a tool created by FlibidyDibidy (initially built to analyze Super. Mario Bros. speedruns), which can use a gameplay video to determine precise character positions and button inputs. The adapted version of Graphite helped ROMHacker GuyPerfect and their team reproduce the gameplay from the original F-Zero courses as loyally as possible.

Where possible, the developers used existing F-Zero art assets from the ROMs in the (non-satellite) original game for the Super Nintendo / Famicom console. To fill in the blanks for lost assets exclusive to the satellite broadcasts, artists Porthor and PowerPanda chipped in to recreate them.

The past few months have put the F-Zero series back in the news, as Nintendo launched a battle royale version last fall of the original 16-bit game for Switch Online subscribers (in the same vein as Tetris 99 and Super Mario Bros. 35). As for the long-lost original BS F-Zero Grand Prix ROMs, Redditor u/Porthgeidwad put up a $5,000 bounty two years ago, allegedly up for grabs for anyone with the original cartridges. While waiting for someone to step up, you can visit the team’s project page and take the reverse-engineered games for a spin.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/game-preservationists-recreate-f-zero-games-beamed-over-satellite-in-the-mid-90s-180013966.html?src=rss 

NVIDIA just released a free demo version of a chatbot that runs locally on your PC. This is pretty neat, as it gives the chatbot access to your files and documents. You can feed Chat with RTX a selection of personal data and have it create summaries based on that information. You can also ask it questions, just like any chatbot, and it’ll dive into your data for answers.

The company says it allows users to “quickly, easily connect local files on a PC as a dataset to an open-source large language model like Mistral or Llama 2.” NVIDIA gives an example of a user asking the chatbot about a restaurant their partner recommended while in Las Vegas. The software scans local files to find the answer. It supports a whole bunch of file formats, including .txt, .pdf, .doc/.docx and .xml. The company says it’ll load relevant files into its dataset “in seconds.”

Chat with RTX also integrates YouTube videos and playlists. You can add a video URL into the dataset and it’ll integrate the knowledge contained in the clip for contextual queries. NVIDIA says this will be useful when asking for travel recommendations “based on content from favorite influencer videos” or when looking for tutorials and summaries derived from educational resources.

The Verge had some hands-on time with the chatbot and came away impressed, writing that they could see it as “a valuable part of data research for journalists or anyone who needs to analyze a collection of documents.”

This sounds like a big step toward something resembling an actual digital assistant that works within the contextual framework of your personal data. With most chatbots, the data is sent off to the cloud, but Chat with RTX “lets users process sensitive data on a local PC without the need to share it with a third party or have an internet connection.” So it’s safer and more contextually aware.

There are some limitations. This is a demo product so you should expect plenty of bugs, though NVIDIA should start squashing them once users begin issuing error reports and the like. There are also some strict hardware limitations here. Chat with RTX only works on Windows PCs with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs or higher and at least 8GB of VRAM.

NVIDIA has really been showing off its AI prowess lately, as the company just launched its next-generation of artificial intelligence supercomputer chips. It’s absolutely swimming in profits, due primarily to the company’s AI and data center segments.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/nvidias-new-ai-chatbot-runs-locally-on-your-pc-163406121.html?src=rss 

If you’re looking to boost the storage space of a Nintendo Switch, Steam Deck, Raspberry Pi or any other device that accepts a microSD card, here’s a deal worth noting: The 512GB version of Samsung’s Evo Select card is back on sale for $25. That matches the lowest price we’ve tracked for this model, which normally retails between $30 and $35. The offer is available at Amazon, B&H and Samsung’s own online store.

The Evo Select is the “best value” pick in our guide to the best microSD cards. It’s still a step down from our top picks, especially when it comes to sequential write speeds, so it’s not ideal for a camera or other devices that frequently require you to save large files to the card itself. But if you just want a big chunk of space for as little cash as possible, it should be perfectly usable for most use cases. Its sequential read performance was faster than most other cheapo cards we tested, and there aren’t many options from reputable manufacturers that provide more space per dollar. If something ever goes wrong, Samsung covers the card with a 10-year limited warranty. We tested the 128GB version of the card, but this 512GB model has the same speed ratings, so we’d expect it to perform similarly.

If you’re willing to trade some capacity for faster performance, the 256GB Samsung Pro Ultimate is also on sale for $28. That’s $3 more than its all-time low, but it’s a decent price if you need something a little more heavy-duty. The Samsung Pro Plus, meanwhile, remains our top recommendation overall but isn’t significantly discounted as of this writing.

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This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/one-of-our-favorite-samsung-microsd-cards-is-on-sale-for-25-152156415.html?src=rss