Luke AFB, Arizona-56th Fighter Wing
about 5 years ago

#TBT In 1967, Capt Bob Pardo’s wingman was hit over Vietnam and didn’t have enough fuel to make it to Laos. Pardo told him to lower his tail hook and he pushed him 90 miles over the border where they all ejected and were rescued.

Lt Col Pardo retired from Luke in 1974.

For the whole story click here: https://www.luke.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/1397511/legendary-pilot-inspires-new-generation-of-air-warriors/

Forty-six years ago, the deadliest peacetime aviation disaster in history took place. //

After the crash, it became mandatory for pilots and air traffic controllers in most countries around the world to use standardized, hard-to-confuse terminology. Words such as "OK" were replaced with "Roger" (meaning that the receiving person acknowledges). Phrases such as "We're at takeoff" were replaced with "[Insert Flight Number] is taking off the runway [insert number]" or "[Insert Flight Number] holding short runway [insert number]".

In the moments leading up to the crash, both the first officer and flight engineer were hesitant to question Captain Van Zanten's decision to immediately go for takeoff roll due to his seniority at KLM. In a post-1977 world, airlines began to incorporate playing down the idea of a cockpit hierarchy, choosing to place more emphasis on pilot training based on team decision-making. This idea of "Crew Resource Management" (CRM), has become a mandatory requirement for cockpit crew training in North/South America (FAA) and Europe (EASA) since 2006.

http://www.project-tenerife.com/nederlands/PDF/finaldutchreport.pdf/tenerife-air-disaster-report

Director Ridley Scott has achieved the impossible—making Napoleon Bonaparte boring. //

It takes a certain kind of genius to ruin a film about Napoleon Bonaparte.

For crying out loud, this is the Corsican artillery commander who became the de facto emperor of continental Europe, the man who carried the French Revolution into Spain, Italy, Austria, and Germany, sparking the political movements that would culminate in the First World War.

This man doomed the Spanish empire, freeing Latin America from its rule and enabling the U.S. to double in size in the Louisiana Purchase. He did all this and found time to craft a law code on par with the Roman Emperor Justinian.

This man coopted an atheistic revolution, convinced the pope to come to Paris to crown him, and then, in a fit of pique, decided to crown himself instead.

Depending on your perspective, Napoleon smothered Europe with divisive passions or brought enlightenment to a backward continent. He either represents the apotheosis of the French Revolution or its ultimate betrayal.

So many moments in Napoleon’s life would make excellent standout films. The subject is an artist’s dream.

Yet somehow, director Ridley Scott managed to make this quintessentially enigmatic historical figure drop-dead boring. //

Ultimately, the film feels like a disengaged fifth grader’s petulant history project. It takes pains to note when and where each event takes place, as if to say, “Hey, audience, see this? It actually happened, please care about it,” without allowing the events to breathe.

This slavish obsession with accuracy seems an extreme overcorrection from “Gladiator,” where Scott butchered the historical record but captured the heart of Roman virtue. Here, Scott has preserved the history only by carefully excising the drama and passion that audiences expect from a blockbuster film. //

As if an afterthought, the movie serves up two spectacles of battle: Austerlitz and Waterloo, but manages to remove any real drama from those famous conflagrations. In each case, the audience has no sense of why the battles are important, what Napoleon and his opponents are trying to achieve, and why they should care about the men dying before their eyes.

By contrast, “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” provides a masterclass in battle storytelling. The Battle of Helm’s Deep delivers an awesome spectacle of fascinating siege tactics, setting and fulfilling audience expectations, and making audiences care by placing the main characters at the heart of the action. Viewers have a stake in the twists and turns of the battle because they have gotten to know and care about Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), Legolas (Orlando Bloom), and Gimli (John Rhys Davies), who are intimately involved in the fighting.

By contrast, audiences in “Napoleon” see nameless, faceless soldiers fighting in ranks they don’t understand, with Napoleon in the distance commanding things. The film has spent no time explaining why the battle matters, what the ramifications are for France if Napoleon loses, and why viewers should care about those doing the fighting. All we know is that this is a massive battle, and Napoleon is in control, so we should just watch and eat our popcorn.

The problem with this approach is that it tosses all the drama out the window. //

I got the sense that if someone could just sit down with Scott and tell him, “Hey, here’s why Napoleon’s important, and why he’s actually interesting,” perhaps we would have got something a little more like “Gladiator” and a little less like “Real Housewives of Revolutionary Paris.” ///

History should be taught as drama; to do that, one has to connect with historical people, understand why they matter, and the consequences of their action or inaction. Then the dates and events make sense.

• Pan Am ceased operations over 30 years ago following more than six decades in the business.
• The airline's history began in 1927 with mail service between Key West and Havana, eventually expanding its routes worldwide.
• Despite its eventual downfall due to fuel prices and deregulation, Pan Am's legacy lives on.

It has been over three decades since Pan American World Airways operated its last flight. The carrier, affectionately referred to as "Pan Am," ceased operations 32 years ago, with its final flight taking place on December 4, 1991.

The airline was known to be a leader in technology and innovation, having operated several aircraft types throughout its more than 60-year history. Next month will mark 95 years since it commenced passenger services.

Pan Am's Pacific Clipper Journey in World War 2 ( written 1999):
The 'Round The World Saga of the "Pacific Clipper" by John A. Marshall

December 7, 1941 - January 6, 1942

The first blush of dawn tinged the eastern sky and sent its rosy fingers creeping onto the flight deck of the huge triple-tailed flying boat as she cruised high above the South Pacific. Six days out of her home port of San Francisco, the Boeing 314 was part of Pan American Airways' growing new service that linked the far corners of the Pacific Ocean. With veteran captain Robert Ford in command, the Pacific Clipper, carrying 12 passengers and a crew of ten was just a few hours from landing in the harbor at Auckland, New Zealand.

The calm serenity of the flight deck early on this spring morning was suddenly shattered by the crackling of the radio. Radio Operator John Poindexter clamped the headset to his ears as he deciphered the coded message. His eyes widened as he quickly wrote the characters on the pad in front of him. Pearl Harbor had been attacked by Japanese war planes and had suffered heavy losses; the United States was at war. The stunned crew looked at each other as the implications of the message began to dawn. They realized that their route back to California was irrevocably cut, and there was no going back. Ford ordered radio silence, and then posted lookouts in the navigator's blister. Two hours later, the Pacific Clipper touched down smoothly on the waters of Auckland harbor. The odyssey was just beginning.

In a conference announcing the deal, Juan Trippe told the press that the decision to buy Boeing's new jet transport, to be called the 747, was his most exciting experience with Pan American since the airline's beginnings almost four decades earlier.

Everything about the deal was big: Biggest commercial jet plane (680,000 pounds gross weight), biggest commercial aircraft order ($525 million), biggest jet engines (Pratt and Whitney JT9D turbofans putting out 41,000 lbs. thrust each), a predicted passenger seating capacity that would more than double any then-existing jet transport. Trippe was betting on a predicted increase in commercial passenger travel that indicated 70% growth in the coming five years, he told reporters. Cargo versions of the 747 - Pan Am was ordering two in the initial order - would carry 214,000 lbs. of freight.

Juan Trippe's long-held belief that inexpensive air travel for ever-greater numbers of people could make the world a more peaceful place was about to be taken to it's highest expression.

Nobody minded for 20 years or so, until another student took action. //

Have you ever been asked to fix unofficial apps, written one yourself, or delivered mission-critical services while still a student? If so, click here to send On Call an email and we'll consider your story for a future instalment.

Don't be shy – we always need more yarns to consider. And remember: you'll always be anonymous.

Cinematography and a conservative bent are not enough to redeem this historical falsification of Napoleon’s life. //

Still, it is sadly not enough to redeem what could have been a glorious film about an epochal man’s rise and fall. Ridley Scott tries to tell an interesting story about Napoleon but falls flat in both respects. The story is bland and spastic, with seemingly random jumps between unrelated scenes that confuse more than clarify. The movie treats its central figure with scorn, making it an uncomfortable experience for the average viewer and a positively infuriating one for the historically inclined. The battles are enjoyable but are not worth the price of admission. You’d be far better off waiting for it to come to streaming or skipping it altogether.

The Great Man deserved more than this falsification of his fascinating life. The audience does, too.

Kissinger served as U.S. secretary of state during the Ford and Nixon administrations and has been an advisor to business leaders as well as many Democratic and Republican politicians, including several presidents. He was one of the architects of the global depopulation agenda and the globalist World Economic Forum (WEF).

Kissinger shaped U.S. foreign policy, especially in the 1970s under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. //

Apart from his public role in U.S. foreign policy, Kissinger was a key leader in the global depopulation agenda. A 1974 National Security Study memo called “The Kissinger Report,” which was declassified in 1989, advocated for policies to drastically reduce fertility rates globally to combat so-called “overpopulation.” His plan became a reality a year later as President Gerald Ford signed National Security Decision 314.

Furthermore, Kissinger was Klaus Schwab’s mentor and helped him to found the globalist WEF. Shortly after the beginning of the COVID crisis in 2020, Kissinger called for a global “post-coronavirus order” and recommended a re-shaping of the global order similar to Klaus Schwab’s plan, which was released later that year in his book COVID-19: The Great Reset.

Since World War II, most American Jews have believed that the more secular American society is, the more secure their status.

This has been, as I have argued all of my life, a colossal error. Indeed, it may turn out to be a fatal error.

With the outburst of unprecedented levels of antisemitism, American Jews are living the famous warning: “Beware what you wish for; you just may get it.”

The primary reason American Jews have lived in the most Jew-friendly, even Jew-honoring, country in history is that most Americans have been Christian. But we must make a key distinction here. American Christians have been not just Christian, as Europe was, but Judeo-Christian. //

In a famous study published in the American Political Science Review, Donald Lutz, a professor of political science at the University of Houston, surveyed the political literature of the American founding. He found that the Bible was cited more frequently than any other work or any other author. The Bible accounted for approximately one-third of the Founders’ citations. The single most frequently cited work was Deuteronomy, the fifth of the five books of the Torah.

The late great Catholic theologian Michael Novak wrote that the roots of the doctrine that “all men are created equal lie in Judaism, carried around the world by Christians.”

As American society and Americans individually become less religious, i.e., less Christian, the Jews become less significant.

Yet, many, perhaps most, American Jews, have bought—and promulgated—the idea that Jewish security in America lies in secularizing, i.e., de-Christianizing, America. //

Look around, my fellow Jews. Are you happy with the results of the secularization of America? Do you feel more secure? Or less?

I ask you: Is it not obvious that when more Americans attended church every Sunday, America’s Jews were far more secure?

Can you pass the U.S. citizenship exam?

Every year, the United States welcomes nearly 1 million new citizens through naturalization ceremonies, all of whom must pass the American citizenship exam by answering 6 out of 10 questions correctly.

While 90% of legal immigrant applicants pass the exam, only 30% of U.S. adults and just 3% of public high school students in America can pass it!

PragerU is determined to educate millions of young people about American history, civics, and the values that have made this country great. If you've watched enough PragerU videos, passing the exam should be a breeze.

Take this quiz to see if you can pass the U.S. citizenship exam.

The venerable PDP-11 minicomputer is still spry to this day, powering GE nuclear power-plant robots - and will do so for another 37 years.

That's right: PDP-11 assembler coders are hard to find, but the nuclear industry is planning on keeping the 16-bit machines ticking over until 2050 – long enough for a couple of generations of programmers to come and go.

Now that you've cleaned up the coffee spills and finished laughing, take a look here, at Vintage Computer forums, where GE's Chris Issel has resorted to seek assembly programmers for the 1970s tech.

Wednesday 19th June 2013 08:28 GMT
John Smith 19Gold badge
Coat
PDP 11 odds and ends.
The PDP 11 (like the PARC Alto) had a main processor built from standard 4 bit TTL "ALU" parts and their companion "register file." So 2nd, 3rd,4th sourced. I'm not sure how many mfg still list them on their available list in the old standard 0.1" pin spacing.

El Reg ran a story that Chorus (formerly British Steel) ran them for controlling all sorts of bits of their rolling mills but I can't recall if they are

I think the core role for this task is the refueling robots for the CANDU reactors. CANDU allows "on load" refuelling. The robots work in pairs locked onto each end of the pressurized pipes that carry the fuel and heavy water coolant/moderator. They then pressurize their internal storage areas, open the ends and one pushes new fuel bundles in while the other stores the old ones, before sealing the ends. However CANDU have been working on new designs with different fuel mixes (CANDU's special sauce (C Lewis Page) is that it's run with unenriched Uranium, which is much cheaper and does not need a bomb making enrichment facility) and new fuel bundle geometries, so time for a software upgrade.

And 128 users on a PDP 11/70. Certain customers ran bespoke OSes in the early 90s that could get 300+ when VMS could only support about less than 20 on the same spec.

Note for embedded use this is likely to be RSX rather than VMS, which also hosted the ICI developed RTL/2, which was partly what hosted the BBC CEEFAX service for decades.

Yes, it's an anorak.. //

Wednesday 19th June 2013 18:20 GMT
Jamie JonesSilver badge
Thumb Up
Who's laughing?
I feel much better knowing this.

What is the alternative? Buggy software written by the "'Have you tried switching it off and on again" generation?

RSX11M - Dave Cutler
Anyone who read the RSX11M sources (driver writers especially) realised that Dave Cutler was a very very good programmer long before he worked on VMS and later Windows NT. He managed to get a multiuser protected general purpose operating system to work with a minimum memory footprint of under 32kbytes on machines with about the same CPU power as the chip on a credit card. (A 96kByte PDP 11/40 (1/3 mip) with 2 RK05 disks (2.4Mbyte each) could support 2 concurrent programmers - a PDP 11/70 (1 mip) with 1Mbyte and 2 RM03 disk packs (65Mbyte each) could support 10 or more.) During the many years that the CEGB used PDP-11 computers with RSX11M, I did not hear of a single OS failure that was not caused by a hardware fault - I wish that current systems were as good. //

Wednesday 19th June 2013 15:09 GMT
annodomini2
Reply Icon
FAIL
Re: there are alternatives
They would never redesign the system, if the system has issues, they are known and fixes are well known.

Changing the system design introduces potential risks and unknowns into the system.

It's not about Zero failure, it's about safe and predictable failure. //

Wednesday 19th June 2013 07:53 GMT
Bob Dunlop
Hey I was taught assembler programming using a pdp11 .

After it's nice clean structure, the mess that was 8086 code came as quite a shock.

anon-89ic
8 days ago edited
It's not just evangelicals. One of the weird things about Israel is that you have to view it through a biblical lens or you miss the point. The IDF truly believes its hand is guided by G-d in this war, which means that no one is going to convince the government to stop what its doing, because this is blasphemy, and the Bible is full of people who got bonked for that conduct. Example: tomorrow, millions of Jews around the world will be celebrating Yigal Amir Day. November 4 is the day that Amir executed Rabin for his existential crime against the Jews. As a reminder of what happened, Rabin had succumbed to demands of the Clinton Administration to a cease fire and halt of military campaigns against the PLO, and raised a stink about proportionality and humanitarian "pauses." As a result, Amir, much like Pinchas in the Torah, rose up amongst the Jewish people and slayed Rabin. And the people rejoiced because they had been spared Rabin's ongoing crimes. How is the Biden Admin celebrating this event? By sending the Secretary of State to Israel to the Prime Minister for a cease fire and halt of military campaigns against the PLO, and raising a stink about proportionality and humanitarian "pauses." If you are Bibi, how do you react to the cluelessness of this timing? The Progressives see what Blinken is doing as "progress." The Israelis view it as "sin." If the United States can't figure this out, and figure out how to work around it, which means not trying this foolishness on Nov 4, then we are nothing more than a paper tiger here in the US while Israel remains the lion of Judah. That's why the evangelicals love Israel and the progressives do not. In the old days, this is why I advised political leaders in Washington, because Washington used to know how to listen. Today, its the bull in the china shop and consequences be damned and Amir had to the bear the burden off Clinton's sins.

What is ultimately behind so many of the (manufactured) ills currently plaguing the West, from leftist lunacy and gender insanity to unnecessary lockdowns and wars?

In a word, the ultra-rich — the billionaire elite. So argues bestselling author Hanne Nabintu Herland, in her latest book, "The Billionaire World: How Marxism Serves the Elite."

In a series of brisk chapters, Herland — an African-born historian of religions and founder of The Herland Report in Scandinavia — traces all of the world’s major problems back to the billionaire elite and their use of Marxist repression and social engineering. //

According to Herland, “82% of all wealth generated in 2017 went to the richest 1% among us, while the poorest world population of 3.7 billion saw no increase in wealth.” //

[T]he richest among us made billions of dollars on the COVID-19 world tragedy, while the world’s poor plunged into unimaginable poverty… The shutdown strategy made the billionaires’ profit soar. In the span of just a few months in 2020, Bill Gates made $75 billion, Jeff Bezos $67.9 billion, Mark Zuckerberg $37.8 billion, and Elon Musk $33.6 billion. //

From a macro-historic perspective, the West is slowly regressing, and the ultra-rich are becoming “the globalist version of feudal lords, as the new Western slave class emerges beneath them.” //

The Marxist attack on historic Western values has weakened the very core of our culture, destroyed social stability and the family, quenched free speech and silenced the people—and thereby removed the obstacles for the billionaire class to gain centralized control.… The combination of strong private corporations coupled with political socialist ideologies has pushed for a radical groupthink model in which the population is expected to agree with the consensus—not unlike that which we witnessed during the National Socialism in Germany before and during World War II.

"Simply modifying" Newtonian gravity to have it spread at finite speed does not work if the finite speed is the speed of light. It was attempted by Laplace in his Celestial Mechanics (1799), who found that the planets will promptly fly off their orbits and the Solar system will disintegrate in seconds, unless the propagation speed is 7×106
times greater than the the speed of light. This is because of the aberration of the direction of attractive force due to delay in transmission, see Resolving General relativity and Newtonian mechanics on a computer.

A more sophisticated modification follows from Mossotti's electromagnetic gravity hypothesis: electric attraction and repulsion do not balance each other exactly, and the difference is gravity. In 1864-72 Seegers, Scheibner and Tisserand experimented with applying the velocity and acceleration dependent correction to Newton's law imported from Weber's electrodynamics to the precession of the perihelion of Mercury. Around 1900 Lorentz, Einstein's precursor on special relativity, showed that under the Maxwell electrodynamics the Laplacian aberration problem is eliminated because the correction is of the order v2/c2
rather than v/c
that Laplace assumed, so the attraction between masses moving with constant relative velocity is always toward the instantaneous position of the other mass. It is the Lorentz invariance of the Maxwell electrodynamics that cancels the effects of transmission delay to the first order, as Poincare pointed out in 1905. See What 19th century developments contributed to the General theory of Relativity?

However, Lorentz's theory did not work either, and this time exactly because of the perihelion of Mercury. //

Einstein first mentions Mercury in a letter to Habicht in 1907:"At the moment I am working on a relativistic analysis of the law of gravitation by means of which I hope to explain the still unexplained secular changes in the perihelion of Mercury."

The VGA default palette in the 256 colour mode (Mode 13h) first has 16 color entries from CGA (which is also same as default 16-color EGA palette and the only palette for 320x200 EGA mode)

Next 16 color entries are 16 shades of gray.

And the next 216 color entries has been already mentioned; they are sets of 24 hues, in 3 different saturation values, and in 3 different brightness values. 24 × 3 × 3 = 216.

The final 8 colour entries are black, or maybe left undefined so BIOS does not overwrite them when changing modes.

The history of TCP congestion control is long enough to fill a book (and we did) but the work done in Berkeley, California, from 1986 to 1998 casts a long shadow, with Jacobson’s 1988 SIGCOMM paper ranking among the most cited networking papers of all time.

Slow-start, AIMD (additive increase, multiplicative decrease), RTT estimation, and the use of packet loss as a congestion signal were all in that paper, laying the groundwork for the following decades of congestion control research. One reason for that paper's influence, I believe, is that the foundation it laid was solid, while it left plenty of room for future improvements–as we see in the continued efforts to improve congestion control today.

And the problem is fundamentally hard: we’re trying to get millions of end-systems that have no direct contact with each other to cooperatively share the bandwidth of bottleneck links in some moderately fair way using only the information that can be gleaned by sending packets into the network and observing when and whether they reach their destination. //

It seems clear that there is no such thing as the perfect congestion control approach, which is why we continue to see new papers on the topic 35 years after Jacobson’s. But the internet's architecture has fostered the environment in which effective solutions can be tested and deployed to achieve distributed management of shared resources.

In my view that’s a great testament to the quality of that architecture. ®

Get ready to say goodbye to a lot of familiar bird names, like Anna's Hummingbird, Gambel's Quail, Lewis's Woodpecker, Bewick's Wren, Bullock's Oriole, and more.

That's because the American Ornithological Society has vowed to change the English names of all bird species currently named after people, along with any other bird names deemed offensive or exclusionary.