Daily Shaarli

All links of one day in a single page.

August 25, 2024

Flowers, 1888 Painting by Joaquin Sorolla - Fine Art America
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Flowers, 1888Flowers, 1888 (Oil on Canvas), by Joaquin Sorolla by Joaquin Sorolla

Ex-Microsoft engineer resurrects PDP-11 from junkyard parts • The Register
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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.

Windows Control Panel set for deprecation • The Register
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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.

If Elon Musk Is Moses, Leading the Exodus From San Francisco, Does That Make Newsom the Pharaoh? – RedState
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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.

Israel Launches Pre-Emptive Strike on Hezbollah After Detecting Imminent Attack From Lebanon
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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.”

LEGO's Concorde is the only supersonic jet you can build for the price of a fancy dinner • The Register Forums

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.

Federal Judge Dismisses Machine Gun Possession Charge as Violations of Second Amendment – RedState
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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.

Court Stops New York AG Letitia James' Effort to Silence Crisis Pregnancy Centers on Progesterone – RedState
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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"

MI Elections Chief Tries To Rush Potentially 'Illegal' Election Rules
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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.”

Asia’s top messaging app tamed Slack sprawl with ChatGPT • The Register
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LY Corp's QA team struggled to manage projects while wading through prolix posts

To crew, or not to crew – that is the question facing Boeing's stricken Starliner • The Register Forums

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.

NEW: NY Post Op-Ed Claims Kamala's Brother-in-Law Fleeced Taxpayers for Billions While a DOJ Lawyer – RedState
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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.