Israel on early morning Sunday launched pre-emptive airstrikes against Hezbollah terrorist group after detecting imminent missile and rocket attacks from Lebanon.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) “identified the Hezbollah terrorist organization preparing to fire missiles and rockets toward Israeli territory. In response to these threats, the IDF is striking terror targets in Lebanon,” the military said in a press release early morning.

Around 100 Israeli fighter jets took part in the defensive strike, taking out thousands of Hezbollah rockets launchers. “In all, thousands of Hezbollah rocket launchers were struck simultaneously by some 100 IAF fighter jets in the preemptive attacks,” The Times of Israel reported.

Hezbollah appears to have launched a large-scale attack on Israel, firing hundreds of rockets during the early morning hours. The Israeli TV channel i24NEWS talked of a “[w]idespread Hezbollah assault launched against northern Israel.”

LY Corp's QA team struggled to manage projects while wading through prolix posts

Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer took a trip down memory lane this week by building a functioning PDP-11 minicomputer from parts found in a tub of hardware.

It's a fun watch, especially for anyone charged with maintaining these devices during their heyday. Unfortunately, Plummer did not place his creation in a period-appropriate case, and one might argue he cheated a bit by using a board containing a Linux computer to present boot devices.

https://youtu.be/GJfeli6H_dc

Plummer's build started with a backplane containing slots for a CPU card, a pair of 512 KB RAM cards, and the Linux card – a QBone by the look of it. Also connected to the backplane were power, along with some halt and run switches.

The QBone is an interesting card and serves as an example of extending the original hardware rather than fully relying on emulation. ... In Plummer's case, he used it to provide a boot device for his bits-from-a-box PDP-11.

Once connected and with a boot device mounted, Plummer was able to fire up the computer with its mighty megabyte of memory and interact with it as if back in the previous century.

ridley
So to be able to use their spacesuits they need to fit a square peg into a round hole?

Best give Mr Lovell a call. //

Avoiding standard docking and space suit adapters seems like a good way of wasting money and time
The thing that most surprises me about this whole mess is why NASA would ever consider that having a different design of docking adapter and space suit for each type of American vehicle that is to dock with the ISS was a good idea..

That the Soviet G2S vehicles would use different docking adapters and space suit connectors is expected: the two parts of the original ISS design were always intended to use differing docking ports and space suit connectors from the get-go.

However, it beggars belief that NASA would not have specfied a common set of docking adapters for all American spacecraft as well as common space suit interface(s), if only to save costs and re-implementation effort by basing these interfaces on than the well-tested Shuttle docking and space suit connectors. AFAIK those never caused problems throughout their useful life. //

Re: Avoiding standard space suit adapters seems like a good way of wasting money and time

No, giving money to SpaceX was seen as a good way of wasting money and time.

REMEMBER: when this all started, Boeing was the shoo-in, and that goofy SpaceX startup was the complete waste of time and money.

Nobody expected SpaceX to actually ever reach Station.

It never entered anyone's mind that SpaceX would eventually have to rescue a Boeing crew.

The American docking adapters ARE standard.

https://www.internationaldockingstandard.com/

https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/meet-the-international-docking-adapter/

American spacecraft, INCLUDING Shuttle, either dock to this, or are berthed by the robot arm to a standard pressure door, which allows larger cargo. //

Re: other good ways of wasting money and time
To ensure SLS block 1 would launch by 2016 congress decided to use an upper stage (Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage) based on Centaur which has been flying since the 60s. The wimpy ICPS massively restricts SLS capabilities so a new Exploration Upper Stage was ordered for SLS block 1B. SLS is assembled on a mobile launch platform in the vertical assembly building and the rocket and platform are carried out together to the launch site by the crawler/transporter. The MLP includes a tower to fill the core stage and upper stage with propellants. The solid rocket boosters have grown an extra segment each since the space shuttle so the combined mass of SLS and MLP are now sufficient damage the crawler transporter's tracks and they path the travel to the launch site. EUS is longer than ICPS so the propellant connections are at a different height. A whole new MLP is required otherwise SLS block 1B would be delayed because modifications to MLP1 would not be able to start until after Artemis III.

Clearly this situation is untenable. What if MLP2 was completed before EUS? Boeing would look bad for delaying Artemis IV. The solution was simple: do not decide what height the propellant connections will be at until the last possible minute. Bechtel cannot start design of MLP2 without that. Moving the connections also moves the fans that blow hydrogen leaks away before the concentration gets big enough for an explosion. Designing the MLP for a choice of connection heights is also tricky. The platform must be optimized for mass so it does not go much further over the limits of the crawler transporter.

If Boeing and SpaceX had to agree on a flight suit connector US astronauts would now have a choice of rides to the ISS: Soyuz or Shenzou.

Believe it or not there is a worse solution. NASA could decide the shape of the flight suit connectors. Congress would then have an opportunity to help like they did with SLS. Giving Boeing and SpaceX the freedom to work independently of congress (and each other) saves a huge amount of time and money. It also means a flight suit design issue does not ground both crew transport systems at the same time.

What is the max skin temperature?
I heard/read somewhere that the reason the max skin temp of the real thing was 127℃ was because it made the maths easier for the engineers. Which makes sense after a little thinking.

I also heard about an SR-71 crew who were buzzing around the Caribbean being alerted to "Civilian traffic at your altitude" and being "WTF?"

Happy
Re: What is the max skin temperature?
What, so _skintemp could be stored as a 7-bit uint?

So... if any part of Concorde's skin ever reached 128°C, it would instantly flash-freeze?

Re: What is the max skin temperature?
127+273=400. (K)

Re: What is the max skin temperature?
Maximum skin temperature of 127ºC was set by the properties of the aluminum alloy used on the Concorde. Sustained exposures to temperatures above that would weaken the alloy. Sustained Mach 3 flight requires use of Titanium or stainless steel.

IIRC, the SR-71's typical operating altitude was a few km higher than the Concorde.

Re: What is the max skin temperature?
There's an interview with the SR71 pilot in the Omegatau podcast.

He was describing how he was pootling around over Cuba doing SR71 type things, when asked to look out for civilian traffic at his flight level

His observation was that he was wearing a space suit and peeing in a tube, while these businessmen flew past in shirt sleeves eating dinner and sipping champagne.

Microsoft has confirmed that the venerable Windows Control panel will finally be put out to pasture in favor of a shiny new Settings app. //

Re: cue the wailing
Control panel also lets you do amazingly complicated and advanced things like... opening more than one control panel item at a time!!!

The number of times I've forgotten that Settings is a kids toy, been looking at one part of the settings menu, realised I needed info from elsewhere so separately go to that other area... and then realise that no, you can't do that. It's binned off what you were looking at before and used the existing Settings session/window to open the new thing instead.

Re: cue the wailing
No, about how you can't set multiple IPs on a network adapter using the settings app.

Or change advanced hardware settings like jumbo frames or VLAN tagging.

Or update the drivers of the thing you're looking at.

Re: cue the wailing
It is done using PowerShell 7 only

Re: cue the wailing
Using undocumented commands - which will eventually be documented, but by then they'll be deprecated.

U.S. District Judge John W. Broomes in Wichita dismissed two machine gun charges against Tamori Morgan, who was indicted in 2023 for possessing a model AM-15 .300 caliber machine gun and a conversion device known as a “Glock switch” that can make a semi-automatic weapon fire at a similar rate to machine guns.

During trial, Morgan’s lawyers argued that these firearms are protected under the Second Amendment, a claim that Broomes upheld. He ruled that machine guns qualify as “bearable arms” under the Second Amendment and that the state failed to demonstrate a historical precedent that justifies the regulation of these weapons.

Why in the ever-loving world should Elon Musk use one red cent of his vast wealth to help improve Mid-Market? In case nobody informed you, Mr. Shaw, that's not his job. The taxpayers are paying some of the highest taxes in the republic, and they have every reason to expect that some of that money would be used to keep people from, well, shooting up and crapping on the streets. That's not Elon's responsibility. He doesn't owe Mid-Market, the Tenderloin, or the city of San Francisco a damn thing. But that's just like the left - sit around whining, waiting for someone else to do something.

Some years ago, one of my literary heroes, Robert Heinlein, wrote about situations just like this:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as "bad luck.” //

If I could offer any advice to Chiu, Shaw, and Gavin Newsom, it would be that they had better keep a sharp eye peeled for locusts. //

Brytek
4 hours ago edited
If they see locusts coming they will make the people in SF eat them instead of meat, that is how they roll.

There is currently a debate over the efficacy and safety of using progesterone to reverse the effects of Mifepristone, a drug used to induce abortions. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists referred to the procedure as “unproven and unethical.” //

On the other side of the debate, the Charlotte Lozier Institute discussed other studies showing that the treatment is safe and effective. //

DaveM
5 hours ago
I find it interesting that abortifacient agents intended to kill babies in the womb are considered "safe" but medications intended to stop the abortifacients from killing babies are considered "unsafe"

OK, that's a lot of text, but the writers raise an interesting point. If they are correct in how this is done, there's potential here that billions - billions of dollars may have been funneled to Democrat candidates, supporters, and donors. And here's the catch; that 1977 change in the law means it may actually be legal.

In an effort to stop Benson from implementing the first set of rules related to the conduct of election recounts ahead of November, the Republican National Committee (RNC) has threatened legal action. In an Aug. 7 communication, Luke Bunting of the RNC Election Integrity Counsel told Benson to “cease any attempt to adopt the proposed administrative ruleset … before the upcoming general election on November 5, 2024, or any other time prior to the effective date of Senate Bill 603, the statutory framework the proposed ruleset is designed to implement.”

“The disastrous SB 603 bill, which should never have been signed into law, does not go into effect until next year,” Gineen Bresso, Election Integrity Director for the RNC and Trump Campaign, told me in a statement. “Yet Jocelyn Benson has decided she can operate above and outside existing law, ram through illegal changes, and further weaken the remaining safeguards in Michigan.”

How the neon-filled glow lamps came to hold a special place in enthusiasts’ hearts

UPDATE 18 JAN. 2024: The nostalgic desire to experience the mid-twentieth-century aesthetic provided by the glow and design language of Nixie tubes has still not gone away. But this niche demand has not been nearly great enough to keep them in production. And now, the last backstock versions of true Nixie tubes, produced in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the 1980s, are at the end of their lifespans. At this point, anyone seeking that old-school glow can find it only in lookalikes made from more contemporary display technologies, like OLEDs that run on much lower voltages and whose manufacturing processes are much less labor intensive. //

Original article from 25 June 2018 follows:

On a cold December morning in the Czech village of Březolupy, a man stops his truck in front of a 17th-century castle. He puts on some heavy gloves, steps out of the truck, and opens the back hatch. Carefully, almost lovingly, he unloads crate after crate of heavy equipment and supplies—an industrial glass lathe, a turbomolecular vacuum pump, and glass. Lots and lots of glass.

The man is Dalibor Farny. In 2012, Farny began working to revive the manufacture of a display technology called the Nixie tube, the last commercial examples of which were produced when he was still a child.

These neon-filled glow lamps were ubiquitous in the late 1950s and 1960s, illuminating numbers, letters, and symbols in scientific and industrial instrumentation. Born in the basement of a German-American tinkerer in the 1930s and later commercialized by the business equipment maker Burroughs Corp., Nixies displayed data vital to NASA’s landing on the moon, lit up critical metrics for controlling nuclear power plants, and indicated the rise and fall of share prices on Wall Street stock exchanges, among thousands of uses. For many people, the warm glow of the Nixie came to evoke an era of unprecedented scientific and engineering achievement, of exciting and tangible discoveries, and of seemingly limitless progress. Remarkably, it continues to do so, even for people who, like Farny, grew up long after the tubes had faded from common use.

AcuteFinder will help you to find duplicate files on your system and delete them. It's simple, easy, and safe to use, and costs as little as $14 to buy.

AcuteFinder not only takes into account items like file name, size or timestamp, but reads through possible duplicates and calculates their checksums. This way, it is guaranteed that the files are really identical, and you can delete the extra copies with full confidence.

AcuteFinder can find files that have different names, like "my.doc" and "Copy of my.doc". Basically, if files are of the same size and have the same checksum, they are considered identical. AcuteFinder uses by default CRC32, a 32-bit checksum, but you can choose to use MD5 hash (128-bit) as a final step in file comparison for even more accuracy.

PeaZip is a free file archiver utility, similar to WinRar, WinZip, and 7-Zip (or File Roller, and Ark on Linux), based on Open Source technologies of 7-Zip / p7zip archiver, Facebook Zstandard compressor, FreeArc, Google Brotli compressor, PAQ family of compressors, PEA (archiving and encryption) project, and other Free Software file compression tools. //

When browsing a filesystem the file browser can show file checksum / hash value on demand in last column, allowing to identify binary identical files which have same checksum/hash value.

Clicking the name of the function (after rightclicking the file manager colum header) PeaZip file manager will display hash or checksum value for all (or selected) files. Clicking "Find duplicates" PeaZip file manager will work as duplicate finder utility, displaying size and hash or checksum value only for duplicate files - same binary identical content featured in two or more distinct files - and will report the number of non-unique files identified.

In a real world application, which is a house with a garden hose, heat pump, sprinkler system or the like, Amtrol's lab results would show the devastating cycling that has long been the cause of pump system failures. A worst-case scenario would be a continuous demand of 7.5 GPM. Using a 15 GPM pump with a tank having 15 gallons of draw down as in Amtrol's "study", there would be continuous cycling every 4 minutes. That would be 360 cycles per day or 131,400 cycles per year. It does not matter if the old pressure tank only system saves any energy or not, the equipment would not last long enough to get a good test. Even if these continuous demands were only required 25% of the time that would still be 32,850 cycles per year with the old pressure tank only system compared to 3,000 cycles per year when using a "cycle control valve".

The Cycle Stop Valve or CSV can save money and energy directly and indirectly. A Variable Frequency Drive or VFD system may use a little less energy than a CSV system at low flow, but the parasitic losses and reduced efficiency of the motor running on a VFD, means the VFD uses more energy at high flow. Over the full range of flow, the amp draw or energy reduction that happens as a CSV throttles the output of a pump can be almost exactly comparable to the energy reduction of a VFD system. To verify this you only need to use the standard Brake Horse Power equation. If you know your flow rate, head, and efficiency the horsepower can be easily figured using our Horse Power Calculator.

However, there is nothing more efficient that a properly sized pump running at it's best efficiency point. Any time you reduce the RPM with a VFD, or throttle the output with a valve, a pump is using more energy per gallon produced, than when the pump is running at it's best efficiency point and full RPM. There are cases where a CSV or VFD can save energy directly. When the flow rate required is between 60% to 90% of the max flow, and rapid cycling into a pressure tank causes multiple motor starts with high inrush currents, a CSV or VFD will reduce the energy consumption directly. The lower the flow rate required, the more energy per gallon is used with a VFD or a CSV. Because head is lost by the square of the pump speed, when a static head or constant pressure must be maintained, a pump cannot be slowed down enough with a VFD, to save anymore energy than a CSV.

To see the indirect ways that a CSV saves energy, we must compare it to the other types of pump control. Cycling on and off into a pressure tank is one of the fastest ways to destroy a pump system. Because of cycling, the average life of small submersible pumps is only about 7 years. Those that cycle the most only last 2 years, while those that cycle the least last about 12 years, hence a 7 year average. Even with a fairly large pressure tank, cycling destroys every component in a pump system. Cycling flexes the bladder in a pressure tank, until the bladder breaks like bending a wire back and forth. Cycling destroys pressure switches, start capacitors and starting relays. Cycling torques the pipe in the well, until the down hole wire is rubbed bare. Cycling can strip pump splines and loosen impellers. Cycling also destroys the motor or strips the motor splines. //

Since cycling is one cause of most pump system failures, eliminating 80% of the cycles with a Cycle Stop Valve, can triple or quadruple the life of every component in the pump system, compared to a pressure tank only system. Because a CSV system runs on standard sinusoidal power at a constant RPM, there are no voltage spikes, harmonics, resonance frequencies, or additional heat produced. A CSV system can more than quadruple the life of a pump system when compared to a VFD. A pump system that last 15 years, can save a tremendous amount of energy over having to replace the pump system every 5 years. Taking into consideration that the CSV system uses a pressure tank that is a fraction of the size and cost of larger pressure tanks, can add substantially to the savings. Reductions in square footage needed to house a large pressure tank, and saving the heat required for that extra square footage, can add even more to the energy savings. Lastly consider the energy used to mine, manufacture, transport, install, and recycle the additional pump systems destroyed by cycling or VFD's.

The biggest "green lie" of all is that VFD's "save energy". When the pumps speed is reduced using a VFD, the Affinity Law states, "horse power is reduced by the cube of the RPM." Many people use this to try and show energy is being saved, by reducing the RPM. This is absolutely not true (See figure #3)).

Figure 3
When running the pump at full speed and maximum flow, the energy used by the VFD itself, along with motor losses from the VFD's sub-standard voltage wave form, causes more energy to be used per gallon. //

The only real energy savings, comes from the system that will last the longest. It takes a lot of energy to mine, manufacture, transport, and install pumps and controls. The longer a system last, the more energy and money is saved. It is very harmful to the environment to install a system that was designed to only last a short time. Our landfills are being filled with electronic components like VFD's, and non-recyclable pumps and motors. This waste a lot of energy and natural resources, leaches heavy metals into our water supplies, and drains money out of your bank account.

Create or De-rate?
When the flow is reduced, the amps drawn by a pump controlled by a VFD, and a pump controlled by a CSV are almost the same. The difference is that a VFD creates a smaller motor from a larger one, and a CSV de-rates the motor load.

When a VFD slows down a 10 HP motor, until it is only drawing a 5 HP load, it has "created" a 5 HP motor from the 10 HP. Even though the motor is only drawing half of a 10 HP load, the harmonic content produced by the VFD increases heat in the motor. The motor must be cooled as if it were a fully loaded 5 HP, which still requires 1/2 a foot per second flow. According to the submersible motor cooling chart, a 6" motor in an 8" casing needs a minimum of 45 GPM to remain cool. So a 10 HP pump and motor in 8" casing, cannot be slowed to less than 45 GPM, or the motor will overheat and be destroyed.

The same 10 HP motor controlled by a CSV doesn't need as much flow to remain cool. This is because the 10 HP motor has been "de-rated" to a 5 HP load. When a CSV restricts a 10 HP pump, the amps can also drop to a 5 HP load.

Head produced by a pump drops off by the square of the speed. Pumps that must lift a certain distance or produce a specific pressure (or TDH) have a minimum speed that will accomplish this task. The speed of a correctly sized pump can only be reduced a small amount if a static head or constant pressure is required. Horse power reductions by the cube of the speed can be insignificant compared to a full speed pump simply pushed to the left of it's curve. Before you can use the Affinity Law the following steps must be taken to determine the minimum speed possible from your pump. The affinity law can then be used to determine the minimum horsepower possible from your pump when using a VFD.

GBenton
3 hours ago
We don't know if their scams to fake support for Kamala/Walz will work yet, but I don't think they would need to do this nonsense if she were actually leading or they were confident in her potential to win.

So far, her whole campaign has been fake, defensive, manufactured, and insecure. //

Chuck in TX GBenton
3 hours ago
If they were leading or there was a real chance she'd win, Beyonce would have showed up.

You knew it was likely to be bad when they had to pull a "bait and switch" to keep people in the seats to hear her, saying there was going to be a special guest appearing, with CNN and others suggesting it was Beyoncé. But then the special guest turned out to be Harris herself. What a letdown. But you know that they don't think much of what they have to present when they have to play games and gaslight people like that.

Bottom line? They're lying because they know what they really think/believe would never go over with the American people. //

The Free Press @TheFP
·
“It is an insult to have an entire convention and not have any policy... Instead, all we get is ‘for the people’ and we're supposed to take that on faith. ”

@BUngarSargon reviews Kamala's DNC speech tonight on The Free Press #LIVE.

12:16 AM · Aug 23, 2024 //

Trump War Room @TrumpWarRoom
·
Kamala says that she stood up "for seniors facing elder abuse."

That's ironic!

10:50 PM · Aug 22, 2024

Isn't this the same lady who helped to cover up Joe Biden's cognitive decline, who wasn't straight with the American people about it? //

myop2
a few seconds ago
How dare you talk about elder abuse. You and jb have cut medicare ( after accusing trump and republicans of doing the same thing) and reduced our Medicare advantage plans, causing doctors to refuse to accept these plans. You, Kamala are the worst liar, cheat, and thief, and abuser.