Mustafa Kemal Ataturk

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was in İstanbul University Faculty of Law with students. December 15, 1930.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (19 May 1881 – 10 November 1938) was an army officer, revolutionary statesman, and founder of the Republic of Turkey as well as its first President.

Mustafa Kemal established himself as an intelligent and extremely capable military commander while serving as a division commander at the Battle of Gallipoli. He later fought with distinction on the eastern Anatolian and Palestinian fronts, making a name for himself during World War I. Following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire at the hands of the Allies, and the subsequent plans for its partition, Mustafa Kemal led the Turkish national movement in what would become the Turkish War of Independence. Having established a provisional government in Ankara, he defeated the forces sent by the Entente powers. His successful military campaigns led to the liberation of the country and to the establishment of the Republic of Turkey.

As the first President of Turkey, Atatürk embarked upon a major programme of political, economic and cultural reforms. An admirer of the Enlightenment, Atatürk sought to transform the ruins of the Ottoman Empire into a modern, democratic, secular, nation-state. The principles of Atatürk's reforms are often referred to as Kemalism and continue to form the political foundation of the modern Turkish state.

"Peace at home, peace in the world."

M.K.ATATURK

Lumsk

www.lumsk.com

Lumsk is a folk metal band from Trondheim, Norway. It combines traditional Norwegian folk music and folklore with rock, progressive rock and metal. The group has both male and female vocals with violin, guitar and drums.

After having released a self-produced demo, the band released an EP called Åsmund Frægdegjevar in 2001 under contract with the record company Spikefarm Records. The next year, the band moved to Tabu Recordings and released their debut album, which had the same title as the previously released EP. The album was characterized by its blend of classical instruments and heavy metal. The songs make up a narrative about the saga of Åsmund, who in Lumsk's interpretation sails from Ireland to rescue a king's daughter from a group of trolls.

Several years later, and with a new vocalist, the band released its second album, called Troll. The album was a departure in many ways from its predecessor - the band had gotten a new vocalist and guitarist, and as a whole the music was not as heavy or dark as on the debut album. There were also fewer songs, and together they didn't compose one narrative, but were rather stories in and of themselves; stories which were based on Nordic mythology and were written by the saga author Birger Sivertsen and his wife Kristin.

The same year the band released the single Nidvisa, which, in addition to the song Allvis from Troll, contained a song written for the action group Give Us Back Christmas (Gi oss jula tilbake in Norwegian) in protest against department stores' early Christmas decorating. The profits from the sale of the single also went to the group.

On February 26, 2007, Lumsk released their third full-length album, entitled Det Vilde Kor. On this album, Lumsk have added music to Det Vilde Kor, which is a collection of poems written by the famous Norwegian poet Knut Hamsun. With this album the music departed from its folk metal sound and incorporated a calmer and slightly more progressive nature.

In July 2007 Espen announced on Lumsk's website that Ketil and Siv Lena would be leaving the band due to a baby being born. They were replaced by Swedish musicians Håkan Lundqvist and Jenny Gustafsson. As of 2008 they are still looking for a replacement for vocalist Stine Mari Langstrand, who also left the band in 2007.

Current members

* Vidar Berg - drums (2005-)
* Espen Warankov Godø - Synthesizer and Male vocals (2000-)
* Eystein Garberg - Guitar (2001-)
* Håkan Lundqvist - Guitar (2007-)
* Jenny Gustafsson - Violin (2007-)
* Espen Hammer - Bass guitar (2002-)

Albums

* Åsmund Frægdegjevar (2003)
* Troll (2005)
* Det Vilde Kor (2007)

Intel Itanium

Itanium is the brand name for 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). Intel has released two processor families using the brand: the original Itanium and the Itanium 2. Starting November 1, 2007, new members of the second family are again called Itanium. The processors are marketed for use in enterprise servers and high-performance computing systems. The architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP) and was later developed by HP and Intel together.



Itanium's architecture differs dramatically from the x86 architectures (and the x86-64 extensions) used in other Intel processors. The architecture is based on explicit instruction-level parallelism, with the compiler making the decisions about which instructions to execute in parallel. This approach allows the processor to execute up to six instructions per clock cycle. By contrast with other superscalar architectures, Itanium does not have elaborate hardware to keep track of instruction dependencies during parallel execution - the compiler must keep track of these at build time instead.

After a protracted development process, the first Itanium was released in 2001, and more powerful Itanium processors have been released periodically. HP produces most Itanium-based systems, but several other manufacturers have also developed systems based on Itanium. As of 2007, Itanium is the fourth-most deployed microprocessor architecture for enterprise-class systems, behind x86-64, IBM POWER, and SPARC. Intel released its newest Itanium, codenamed Montvale, in November 2007.

Intel has extensively documented the Itanium instruction set and microarchitecture, and the technical press has provided overviews. The architecture has been renamed several times during its history. HP called it PA-WideWord. Intel later called it IA-64, then Itanium Processor Architecture (IPA), before settling on Intel Itanium Architecture, but it is still widely referred to as IA-64. It is a 64-bit register-rich explicitly-parallel architecture. The base data word is 64 bits, byte-addressable. The logical address space is 2^64 bytes. The architecture implements predication, speculation, and branch prediction. It uses a hardware register renaming mechanism rather than simple register windowing for parameter passing. The same mechanism is also used to permit parallel execution of loops. Speculation, prediction, predication, and renaming are under control of the compiler: each instruction word includes extra bits for this. This approach is the distinguishing characteristic of the architecture.

The architecture implements 128 integer registers, 128 floating point registers, 64 one-bit predicates, and eight branch registers. The floating point registers are 82 bits long to preserve precision for intermediate results.

Top Gear

www.bbc.co.uk/topgear

Top Gear is a BAFTA, multi-NTA and International Emmy Award-winning BBC television series about motor vehicles, mainly cars. It began in 1977 as a conventional motoring magazine show. Over time, and especially since a relaunch in 2002, it has developed a quirky, humorous style. The show is presented by Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, James May and The Stig, an anonymous test driver. The programme is estimated to have 385 million viewers worldwide. In 2007 it was one of the most pirated television shows in the world.



The show has received considerable acclaim for its visuals and presentation, as well as a number of criticisms for its content and comments made by presenters. Columnist A. A. Gill described the show as, "a triumph of the craft of programme-making, of the minute, obsessive, musical masonry of editing, the french polishing of colourwashing and grading." Groups such as the Environmental Investigation Agency have criticised the BBC for allowing Top Gear to film in environmentally sensitive areas such as the Makgadikgadi salt pan in Botswana.

New episodes are initially broadcast in the United Kingdom on BBC Two. Episodes of Top Gear are also broadcast on Dave, BBC America, and a number of other television channels around the world. The popularity of the show has led to the creation of two international versions, with local production teams and presenters, for Australia and the United States. Initial episodes of the Australian version is scheduled to be broadcast in the second half of 2008 while NBC is holding the American version for broadcast in February or March, 2009, as a possible mid-season replacement.

Awards and nominations

In November 2005, Top Gear won an International Emmy in the Non-Scripted Entertainment category. In the episode where the presenters showed the award to the studio audience, Clarkson joked that he was unable to go to New York to receive the award since he was too busy writing the script for the show.

Top Gear has also been nominated in three consecutive years (2004–2006) for the British Academy Television Awards in the Best Feature category. Clarkson was also nominated in the best "Entertainment Performance" category in 2006. In 2004 and 2005, Top Gear was also nominated for a National Television Award in the Most Popular Factual Programme category; it won the award in 2006 and 2007. Accepting the award in October 2007, Richard Hammond made the comment that they really deserved it this year, because he didn't have to crash to get some sympathy votes. Also, in Series 10, Richard Hammond won the award for the 'Best TV Haircut' and James May won the award for the worst, while James May also won an award for Heat magazine's "weirdiest celebrity crush" revealed during the news.

Phoenix

MRO (Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter) imaged Phoenix suspended from its parachute during descent through the Martian atmosphere.

phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu



Phoenix is a robotic spacecraft on a space exploration mission on Mars under the Mars Scout Program. The scientists conducting the mission are using instruments aboard the Phoenix lander to search for environments suitable for microbial life on Mars, and to research the history of water there. The multi-agency program is headed by the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, under the direction of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The program is a partnership of universities in the United States, Canada, Switzerland, Denmark, Germany, the United Kingdom, NASA, the Canadian Space Agency, the Finnish Meteorological Institute, Lockheed Martin Space Systems, MacDonald Dettwiler & Associates (MDA) and other aerospace companies.



Phoenix is the sixth successful landing on Mars, out of twelve total attempts (seven of which were American). It is the third successful static lander and the first since Viking 2, and as of 2008 the most recent spacecraft to land successfully on Mars. It is also the first successful landing on a polar region of Mars.

My Dying Bride

mydyingbride.org

My Dying Bride is a British death/doom metal band formed in 1990. My Dying Bride was formed in June 1990 after lead guitarist Andrew Craighan left his former band Abiosis to join Aaron Stainthorpe (vocals), Calvin Robertshaw (guitar) and Rick Miah (drums). Adrian Jackson would join later on bass. After six months of rehearsing, the band recorded and released their demo, Towards the Sinister. Its title was taken from a line in the song "Symphonaire Infernus Et Spera Empyrium".

In the early 1990s My Dying Bride were part of what was known as the Peaceville Three with Paradise Lost and Anathema - all three bands hailing from the north of England. They also toured in 1995 with Iron Maiden as part of their European tour.

Their music is characterised by romantic, sensual lyrics and an obsessive attention to atmospheric detail. Early demos were death metal in a traditional sense, though much slower than most. However, their debut album As the Flower Withers saw the addition of violins and keyboards. Turn Loose the Swans built on that foundation, utilising clean as well as death grunts and, unusually, lead violin on several tracks. Trinity is a compilation of the three early EPs and a 7". The Angel and the Dark River saw the abandonment of death grunts altogether, this added a more traditional Doom feel to the songs. Like Gods of the Sun continued in that direction.

The somewhat experimental 34.788%...Complete was next, which along with the following The Light at the End of the World polarized fans over the band's new direction. My Dying Bride entered something of a hiatus after this, releasing two retrospective albums Meisterwerk 1 and Meisterwerk 2. These albums lay halfway between best of albums and rarity compilations.

It was not until 2001's The Dreadful Hours that My Dying Bride managed to win round the bulk of their former fans. More innovative than The Light at the End of the World, yet retaining all the key elements of the My Dying Bride sound, The Dreadful Hours was a slightly darker release. 2004's follow-up Songs of Darkness, Words of Light showed a band continuing to expand and refine their sound and purpose. A substantial increase in live performances - once an unheard-of rarity - has led to much greater recognition by a new generation of fans.

Between 2003 and 2004, the band's label, Peaceville, re-released their entire back-catalogue in digipak format, with rare bonus tracks (demos, remixes, live performances etc.) added to each release. The band's next release came in May 2005, when they released the fancifully-titled Anti-Diluvian Chronicles, a fully-fledged best of box set featuring three discs and thirty tracks.

My Dying Bride toured the UK in November 2005, playing shows at London Astoria and Bradford Rio. The band spent the winter of 2005/2006 writing material for new studio album A Line of Deathless Kings. The album was released on October 9, 2006. It was preceded by the EP Deeper Down on September 18. Shortly before the release of A Line of Deathless Kings, Shaun Taylor-Steels announced his permanent departure from the band due to persistent problems with his ankle.

In early 2007, Jackson announced his departure and session-drummer John Bennett could no longer stay, citing a lack of time due to work commitments. Replacements were found in Lena Abé on bass and Dan Mullins on drums.

Pre-production has begun for My Dying Bride's next album. The band has entered the Futureworks studio in Manchester. Andrew Craighan stated that there are no song or album titles yet, but the feel of the album is, in his words, 'heading for empty and bleak with flashes of rage.'

Due to Sarah's pregnancy she has been replaced on keyboards by Katie Stone, announced on June 28th as an official member of the band. Katie is also a trained violinist and will play the parts Martin Powell used to play in live performances. It has been confirmed that she will perform violin on the upcoming album as well.

Current members

* Aaron Stainthorpe - Vocals (1990-)
* Hamish Glencross - Guitar (1999-)
* Andrew Craighan - Guitar (1990-)
* Sarah Stanton - Keyboards (2002-)
* Lena Abé - Bass (2007-)
* Dan Mullins - Drums (2007-)
* Katie Stone - Violin, Keyboards (live) (2008-)

One-time pad

In cryptography, the one-time pad (OTP) is an encryption algorithm where the plaintext is combined with a random key or "pad" that is as long as the plaintext and used only once. A modular addition is used to combine the plaintext with the pad. (For binary data, the operation XOR amounts to the same thing.) It was invented in 1917 and patented a couple of years later. If the key is truly random, never reused, and kept secret, the one-time pad provides perfect secrecy. It has also been proven that any cipher with perfect secrecy must use keys with the same requirements as OTP keys. The key normally consists of a random stream of numbers, each of which indicates the number of places in the alphabet (or number stream, if the plaintext message is in numerical form) which the corresponding letter or number in the plaintext message should be shifted. For messages in the Latin alphabet, for example, the key will consist of a random string of numbers between 0 and 25; for binary messages the key will consist of a random string of 0s and 1s; and so on.

The "pad" part of the name comes from early implementations where the key material was distributed as a pad of paper, so the top sheet could be easily torn off and destroyed after use. For easy concealment, the pad was sometimes reduced to such a small size that a powerful magnifying glass was required to use it. Photos accessible on the Internet show captured KGB pads that fit in the palm of one's hand, or in a walnut shell. To increase security, one-time-pads were sometimes printed onto sheets of highly flammable nitrocellulose.

The one-time pad is derived from the Vernam cipher, named after Gilbert Vernam, one of its inventors. Vernam's system was a cipher that combined a message with a key read from a paper tape loop. In its original form, Vernam's system was not unbreakable because the key could be reused. One-time use came a little later when Joseph Mauborgne recognized that if the key tape was totally random, cryptanalytic difficulty would be increased.

There is some term ambiguity due to the fact that some authors use the term "Vernam cipher" synonymously for the "one-time-pad", while others refer to any additive stream cipher as a "Vernam cipher", including those based on a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator (CSPRNG).

Doris Lessing

dorislessing.org

Doris Lessing CH OBE (born Doris May Tayler in Kermanshah, Persia, (now Iran) on 22 October 1919) is a British writer, author of works such as the novels The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook.

In 2007, Lessing won the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was described by the Swedish Academy as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny". Lessing is the eleventh woman to win the prize in its 106-year history, and also the oldest person ever to win the literature award.

Writing career

Because of her campaigning against nuclear arms and South African apartheid, Lessing was banned from that country and from Rhodesia for many years. Lessing moved to London with her youngest son in 1949 and it was at this time her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, was published. Her breakthrough work, written in 1962, was The Golden Notebook.

In 1984, she attempted to publish two novels under a pseudonym, Jane Somers, to demonstrate the difficulty new authors faced in trying to break into print. The novels were declined by Lessing's UK publisher, but accepted by another English publisher, Michael Joseph, and in the US by Alfred A. Knopf.

She declined a damehood, but accepted a Companion of Honour at the end of 1999 for "conspicuous national service". She has also been made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.

On 11 October 2007, Lessing was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. At 87, she is the oldest person to have received the literature prize and the third oldest Nobel Laureate in any category. She also stands as only the eleventh woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature by the Swedish Academy in its 106-year history. She told reporters outside her home "I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all. It's a royal flush."In a 2008 interview for the BBC's Front Row, she stated that increased media interest following the award had left her without time for writing.

Awards

* Somerset Maugham Award (1954)
* Prix Médicis étranger (1976)
* Austrian State Prize for European Literature (1981)
* Shakespeare-Preis der Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F. V. S., Hamburg (1982)
* W. H. Smith Literary Award (1986)
* Palermo Prize (1987)
* Premio Internazionale Mondello (1987)
* Premio Grinzane Cavour (1989)
* James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography(1995)
* Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1995)
* Premi Internacional Catalunya (1999)
* Order of the Companions of Honour (1999)
* Companion of Literature of the Royal Society of Literature (2000)
* David Cohen British Literary Prize (2001)
* Premio Príncipe de Asturias (2001)
* S.T. Dupont Golden PEN Award (2002)
* Nobel Prize in Literature (2007)

F-8 Crusader

The F-8 Crusader (originally F8U) was a single-engine aircraft carrier-based fighter aircraft built by Chance-Vought of Dallas, Texas, USA. It replaced the Vought F-7 Cutlass. The first F-8 prototype was ready for flight in February 1955, and was the last American fighter with guns as the primary weapon. The RF-8 Crusader was a photo-reconnaissance development and operated longer in U.S. service than any of the fighter versions. RF-8s played a crucial role in the Cuban Missile Crisis, providing essential low-level photographs impossible to acquire by other means. Naval Reserve units continued to operate the RF-8 until 1987.

In September 1952, United States Navy announced a requirement for a new fighter. It was to have a top speed of Mach 1.2 at 30,000 ft (9,150 m) with a climb rate of 25,000 ft/min (127 m/s), and a landing speed of no more than 100 mph (160 km/h). Korean War experience had demonstrated that 0.50 in (12.7 mm) machine guns were no longer sufficient and as the result the new fighter was to carry a 20 mm (0.8 in) cannon. In response, the Vought team led by John Russell Clark created the V-383. Unusual for a fighter, the aircraft had a high-mounted wing which allowed for short and light landing gear.


NASA's F-8C digital fly-by-wire testbed.

The most innovative aspect of the design was the variable-incidence wing which pivoted by 7° out of the fuselage on takeoff and landing. This afforded increased lift due to a greater angle of attack without compromising forward visibility because the fuselage stayed level. Simultaneously, the lift was augmented by leading-edge slats drooping by 25° and inboard flaps extending to 30°. The rest of the aircraft took advantage of contemporary aerodynamic innovations with area ruled fuselage, all-moving stabilators, dog-tooth notching at the wing folds for improved yaw stability, and liberal use of titanium in the airframe. Power came from the Pratt & Whitney J57 afterburning turbojet and the armament, as specified by the Navy, consisted of four 20 mm cannon, a retractable tray with 32 unguided Mighty Mouse FFARs, and cheek pylons for two AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missiles. Vought also presented a tactical reconnaissance version of the aircraft called the V-382. The F-8 Crusader would be the last U.S. fighter designed with guns as its primary weapon.

Major competition came from Grumman with the F-11 Tiger, McDonnell with upgraded twin-engine F3H Demon (which would eventually become the F-4 Phantom II), and North American with their F-100 Super Sabre adopted for carrier use and dubbed the Super Fury.

In May 1953, the Vought design was declared a winner and in June, Vought received an order for three XF8U-1 prototypes (after adoption of the unified designation system in September 1962, the F8U became the F-8). The first prototype flew on 25 March 1955 with John Konrad at the controls. The aircraft exceeded the speed of sound during its maiden flight. The development was so trouble-free that the second prototype, along with the first production F8U-1, flew on the same day, 30 September 1955. On 4 April 1956, the F8U-1 performed its first catapult launch from USS Forrestal.

IBM Roadrunner

Roadrunner is a supercomputer built by IBM at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA. Currently the world's fastest computer, the US$133-million Roadrunner is designed for a peak performance of 1.7 petaflops, achieving 1.026 on May 25, 2008,and to be the world's first TOP500 Linpack sustained 1.0 petaflops system. It is a one-of-a-kind supercomputer, built from commodity parts, with many novel design features.


A Cell Processor

IBM built the computer for the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration. It is a hybrid design with 12,960 IBM PowerXCell 8i CPUs and 6,480 AMD Opteron dual-core processors in specially designed server blades connected by Infiniband. The Roadrunner uses the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system and is managed with xCAT distributed computing software. It occupies approximately 6,000 square feet (560 m²) and became operational in 2008.

The DOE plans to use the computer for simulating how nuclear materials age in order to predict whether the USA's aging arsenal of nuclear weapons is safe and reliable. Other uses for the Roadrunner include the sciences, financial, automotive and aerospace industries.

Racetrack Memory

Racetrack Memory is an experimental non-volatile memory device under development at IBM's Almaden Research Center by a team led by Stuart Parkin, as well as teams at various other locations. In early 2008 a 3-bit version was successfully demonstrated.

IBM's version of racetrack uses spin-coherent electric current to move the magnetic domains along an U-shaped nanoscopic wire. As current is passing through the wire, the domains move over the magnetic read/write heads positioned at the bottom of the U, which alter the domains to record patterns of bits. A memory device is made up of many such wires and read/write elements. In general operational concept, racetrack memory is similar to the earlier twistor memory or bubble memory of the 1960s and 70s, but uses much smaller magnetic domains and dramatic improvements in magnetic detection capabilities to provide far higher areal densities.

One limitation of the early experimental devices was that the magnetic domains could only be pushed slowly through the wires, requiring current pulses on the orders of microseconds to move them successfully. This was unexpected, and led to performance roughly equal to hard drives, as much as 1000 times slower than predicted. Recent research at the University of Hamburg has traced this problem to microscopic imperfections in the crystal structure of the wires which led to the domains becoming "stuck" at these imperfections. Using an x-ray microscope to directly image the boundaries between the domains, their research found that domain walls would be moved by pulses as short as a few nanoseconds when these imperfections were absent. This corresponds to a macroscopic speed of about 110 m/s.

To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee published in 1960. Upon its release, it was instantly successful and has become a classic of modern American fiction. The novel is loosely based on the author's observations of her family and neighbors, as well as an event that occurred near her hometown in 1936, when she was 10 years old.

The novel is renowned for its warmth and humor, while still dealing with the serious issues of rape and racial inequality. Atticus Finch, the narrator's father, has served as a moral hero for many readers, and a model of integrity for lawyers. One critic explained its impact by writing, "in the twentieth century, To Kill a Mockingbird is probably the most widely read book dealing with race in America, and its protagonist, Atticus Finch, the most enduring fictional image of racial heroism."

As a Southern gothic novel and a bildungsroman, the primary themes of To Kill a Mockingbird involve racial injustice and the destruction of innocence, but scholars have also noted that Lee addresses the issues of class tensions, courage and compassion, and gender roles in the American Deep South. The book is widely taught in schools in English-speaking countries with lessons that emphasize tolerance and decry prejudice. Despite its themes, To Kill a Mockingbird has been the target of various campaigns to have it removed from public classrooms. Often the book is challenged for its use of racial epithets, and writers have noticed that while white readers react favorably to the novel, black readers tend to respond less positively.

Lee's novel was initially reviewed by at least 30 different newspapers and magazines, which varied widely in their assessment of the novel. More recently, it has been ranked by librarians next to the Bible as a book "every adult should read before they die".The book was adapted into an Oscar-winning film by director Robert Mulligan, with a screenplay by Horton Foote, in 1962. In 1990 it was adapted as a play that is performed annually in Harper Lee's hometown of Monroeville, Alabama and has transformed the town into a tourist destination. To date, it is Lee's only published novel, and though she continues to respond to the book's impact, she has refused any personal publicity for herself or the novel since 1964.

Antares

Antares is a star in the Milky Way galaxy and the sixteenth brightest star in the nighttime sky (sometimes listed as fifteenth brightest, if the two brighter components of the Capella quadruple star system are counted as one star). Along with Aldebaran, Spica, and Regulus it is one of the four brightest stars near the ecliptic. The similarly colored Aldebaran lies almost directly opposite Antares in the Zodiac.

Antares is a class M supergiant star, with a diameter of approximately 700 times that of the sun; if it were placed in the centre of our solar system, its outer surface would lie between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Antares is approximately 600 light years from our solar system. Its visual luminosity is about 10,000 times that of the Sun, but because the star radiates a considerable part of its energy in the infrared part of the spectrum, the bolometric luminosity equals roughly 65,000 times that of the Sun. The mass of the star is calculated to be 15 to 18 solar masses. Its large size and relatively small mass give Antares a very low average density.

The best time to view Antares is on or around May 31 of each year, when the star is at "opposition" to the Sun. At this time, Antares rises at dusk and sets at dawn, and is thus in view all night (depending on your position on Earth). For approximately two to three weeks on either side of November 30, Antares is not visible at all, being lost in the Sun's glare; this period of invisibility is longer in the Northern Hemisphere than in the Southern Hemisphere, since the star's declination is significantly south of the celestial equator.

LINA

LINA is a thin virtual layer that enables developers to write and compile code using ordinary Linux tools, then run that code on a variety of operating systems. For users, LINA runs invisibly in the background, enabling them to install and run these Linux applications as if they were native to that users' operating system.

LINA enables Linux applications to run on Windows, Mac OS X, and UNIX operating systems with native look and feel. GUI applications running on LINA are indistinguishable from the other applications on the user's machine because they utilize the native libraries of the underlying operating system. LINA integrates native Linux command line applications directly into the DOS, Mac OS X, or UNIX console. The configuration files of Web applications that run on LINA are fully accessible and editable.

Openfiler

Openfiler is an operating system that provides file-based network-attached storage (NAS) and block-based Storage area network (SAN). It was created by Xinit Systems, and is based on the rPath Linux distribution. It is free software licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2. Its software stack interfaces with open source third-party software.

Features

Networking protocols supported by Openfiler include: NFS, SMB/CIFS, HTTP/WebDAV, FTP and iSCSI (initiator). Network directories supported by Openfiler include NIS, LDAP (with support for SMB/CIFS encrypted passwords), Active Directory (in native and mixed modes), Windows NT 4 domain controller and Hesiod. Authentication protocols include Kerberos 5. Openfiler includes support for volume-based partitioning, Ext3, JFS and XFS as on-disk native filesystems, point-in-time snapshots with scheduling, quota-based resource allocation, and a single unified interface for share management which makes allocating shares for various network file-system protocols easy.

The following are just some of the features currently available in Openfiler:

A. Block-based virtualization
1. Point-in-time snapshot support with scheduling
2. Online volume size expansion (testing)
3. Volume usage reporting
4. Support for multiple volume groups for optimal storage allocation
5. iSCSI initiator (manual currently)
6. Volume migration & replication (manual currently)

B. Accounts management
1. Authentication using Pluggable Authentication Modules, configured from the web-interface
2. NIS, LDAP, Hesiod, Active Directory (native and mixed modes), NT4 domain controller
3. Guest/public account support

C. Quota / resource allocation
1. Per-volume group-quota management for space and files
2. Per-volume user-quota management for space and files
3. Per-volume guest-quota management for space and files
4. User and group templates support for quota allocation

D. Share management
1. Per-volume based share creation
2. Multi-level share directory tree
3. Multi-group based access control on a per-share basis
4. Multi-host/network based access control on a per-share basis
5. Per-share service activation (NFS, SMB/CIFS, HTTP/WebDAV, FTP)
6. Support for auto-created SMB home directories

E. Industry-standard protocol suite
1. CIFS/SMB support for Microsoft Windows-based clients
2. NFSv3 support for all UNIX clients with support for ACL protocol extensions
3. NFSv4 support (testing)
4. FTP support
5. WebDAV and HTTP 1.1 support
6. Linux distribution back-end for any other customizations
7. Open source provides you the power to modify and deploy software if you want to do so

Hyper-V

Hyper-V, codenamed Viridian, formerly known as Windows Server Virtualization, is a hypervisor based virtualization system for x64 versions of Windows Server 2008, to be made available 180 days after the OS is released to manufacturing. The Hyper-V hypervisor will also be available as a stand-alone offering, without the Windows Server functionality, as Microsoft Hyper-V Server. Release candidates of Windows Server 2008 include a preview of Hyper-V.

Architecture

Hyper-V supports isolation in terms of a partition. A partition is a logical unit of isolation, supported by the hypervisor, in which operating systems execute. A hypervisor instance has to have at least one root partition, running Windows Server 2008. The virtualization stack runs in the root partition and has direct access to the hardware devices. The root partition then creates the child partitions which hosts the guests OSs. A child partition can also spawn further child partitions of their own. A parent partition creates child partitions using the hypercall API, which is the application programming interface exposed by Hyper-V.

A virtualized partition does not have access to the physical processor, nor does it handle its real interrupts. Instead, they have a virtual view of the processor and run in Guest Virtual Address, which depending on the configuration of the hypervisor, may or may not be the entire virtual address space. A hypervisor may choose to expose only a subset of the processors to each partition. The hypervisor handles the interrupts to the processor, and redirects them to the respective partition using a logical Synthetic Interrupt Controller (SynIC). Hyper-V can hardware accelerate the address translation between various Guest Virtual Address-spaces by using an IOMMU (I/O Memory Management Unit) which operates independent of the memory management hardware used by the CPU.

Child partitions do not have direct access to hardware resources, instead they have a virtual view of the resources, in terms of virtual devices. Any request to the virtual devices is redirected via the VMBus to the devices in the parent partition, which will manage the requests. The VMBus is a logical channel which enables inter-partition communication. The response is also redirected via the VMBus. If the devices in the parent partition are also virtual devices, it will be redirected further till it reaches the root partition, where it will gain access to the physical devices. Parent partitions run a Virtualization Service Provider (VSP) which connects to the VMBus and handles device access requests from child partitions. Child partition virtual devices internally run Virtualization Service Consumer (VSC) which redirect the request to VSPs in the parent partition via the VMBus. This entire process is transparent to the guest OS.

Virtual Devices can also take advantage of a Windows Server Virtualization feature, named Enlightened I/O, for storage, networking and graphics subsystems, among others. Enlightened I/O is specialized virtualization-aware implementation of high level communication protocols like SCSI to take advantage of VMBus directly, bypassing any device emulation layer. This makes the communication more efficient but requires the guest OS to support Enlightened I/O.

Appleseed Ex Machina

Appleseed Ex Machina

Appleseed Ex Machina IMDb

Appleseed EX Machina is an anime film and is the sequel to the 2004 Appleseed film, similarly directed by Shinji Aramaki. It was released on 20th October 2007 in Japan and fully involved Hong Kong director and producer John Woo. The film made its American premiere at The Jules Verne Adventures Film Festival in Los Angeles on December 15th, 2007.

Plot summary

Following the non-nuclear war that killed half the world's population, the city-nation of Olympus stands as a beacon of hope in a world of chaos and conflict. The utopian metropolis is governed by Gaia, a vast artificial intelligence, and administered by genetically engineered humanoids known as bioroids, whose designer DNA suppresses strong emotions. With Bioroids being half of its population, peace and order are easily maintained.

Deunan Knute, a young female warrior, and Briareos, a veteran cyborg-soldier, are both partners and lovers. As members of E.S.W.A.T., the elite special forces serving Olympus, they are deployed whenever trouble strikes. The two fighters find their partnership tested in a new way by the arrival of a new member to their ranks — an experimental bioroid named Tereus.

Created by Gaia using DNA from Briareos, Tereus uncannily resembles Briareos before the wartime injuries that led to his becoming a cyborg. Not only does this trouble Deunan, but Briareos's DNA gives Tereus more than top-notch fighting skills; this battle-ready bioroid is like Briareos in another way — he also has strong romantic feelings for Deunan.

Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine

The Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine

The Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM), nicknamed Baby, was the world's first stored-program computer. Developed by Frederic C. Williams and Tom Kilburn at the University of Manchester, it ran its first program on June 21, 1948.

The computer was built around a Williams tube, a particular type of cathode ray tube (CRT) which had been developed by Williams at the Telecommunications Research Establishment in July-November 1946, before he joined the University of Manchester in December 1946. Working with Kilburn at the university they increased the storage capacity of the CRT from one bit to 2048 by October 1947 using a 64 by 32 array. This could be used for a computer's memory, with the advantage of allowing random access to memory, rather than the sequential access of the delay line memory units.

The SSEM was a very limited machine, designed to test the Williams tube and other hardware rather than as a practical computer. The SSEM had a single 32 by 32-bit word store, a second CRT to hold a single 32-bit accumulator, and a third CRT to hold the current instruction and its address. A fourth CRT was the output device, displaying the bit pattern of any chosen storage tube. The inputdevice was a set of 32 buttons with manual switches to set the bit pattern of any word.

A whole word was used for any instruction, with bits 0–12 representing the address and bits 13–15 the code defining the function. An instruction was executed in 1.2 milliseconds and the main store was refreshed every 16 instructions.

It was limited because it could store a total of only 32 numbers and instructions, and the instruction set was very limited. The initial seven instructions were:

* jump indirect
* relative jump indirect
* take a number from memory, negate it, and load it into the accumulator
* write the number in the accumulator back to memory
* subtract a value from the accumulator
* skip next if accumulator is negative
* stop

A division program was written, using pencil-and-paper method, operating on one bit at a time. It was used to divide 230-1 by 31, giving the answer in about 1.5 seconds. Then this routine was used in a program to show that 314,159,265 and 217,828,183 are relatively prime. Finally, a program was written to find the largest divisor of integers, by testing all numbers from a starting point down as possible divisors, with repeated subtraction used for division. This program consisted 17 instructions and it was written by Kilburn. (A 19-instruction amended version of it has been published.) It ran successfully on June 21, 1948, first on small integers. Within a few days it was run on 230-1 by trying every number from 218-1 down. It ran for 52 minutes, executing 3.5 million accesses to memory and 2.1 million instructions, and produced the correct answer.

The SSEM developed into the Manchester Mark I, which led to the Ferranti Mark I, the world's second commercially available general-purpose computer. At around the same time EDSAC was being developed at the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory.

A working replica of the SSEM was created in 1998 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the running of its first program. This is on display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester.

Hiberno-English

Hiberno-English Wikipedia

Hiberno-English — also known as Anglo-Irish and Irish English — is the form of English spoken in the Republic of Ireland and, to a lesser degree, some parts of Northern Ireland. It is the result of the interaction of the English and Irish languages. English was mainly brought to Ireland during the Plantations of Ireland in the sixteenth century and established itself in Dublin and in the area of Leinster known as the Pale. It was later introduced into Ulster during the Plantation of Ulster through Belfast and the Lagan Valley in the seventeenth century. The linguistic influence of the Irish language is most evident in Gaeltachtaí, areas where Irish is still spoken, as well as in areas where, before the complete adoption of English, Irish continued to be spoken for longer than in other areas.

The standard spelling and grammar of Irish-English are largely the same as common British English. However, some unique characteristics exist, especially in the spoken language, owing to the influence of the Irish language on the pronunciation of English. Due in most part to the influence of the US media abroad, many words and phrases of American English have become interchangeable with their Hiberno-English equivalents, most especially with the youngest generations. British English, however, remains the greatest influence on grammar, spelling and lexicon on English in Ireland.

Grammar

...Conditionals have a greater presence in Hiberno-English due to the tendency to replace the simple present tense with the conditional (would) and the simple past tense with the conditional perfect (would have).

* John asked me would I buy a loaf of bread ('John asked me to buy a loaf of bread')
* How do you know him? We would have been in school together. ('We went to school together')...

Riemann Hypothesis

The real part (red) and imaginary part (blue) of the Riemann zeta-function along the critical line Re(s) = 1/2. You can see the first non-trivial zeros at Im(s) = ±14.135, ±21.022 and ±25.011.


The Riemann hypothesis (also called the Riemann zeta-hypothesis), first formulated by Bernhard Riemann in 1859, is one of the most famous and important unsolved problems in mathematics. It has been an open question for almost 150 years, despite attracting concentrated efforts from many outstanding mathematicians. Unlike some other celebrated problems, it is more attractive to professionals in the field than to amateurs.

The Riemann hypothesis (RH) is a conjecture about the distribution of the zeros of the Riemann zeta-function ζ(s). The Riemann zeta-function is defined for all complex numbers s ≠ 1. It has zeros at the negative even integers (i.e. at s = −2, s = −4, s = −6, ...). These are called the trivial zeros. The Riemann hypothesis is concerned with the non-trivial zeros, and states that:

The real part of any non-trivial zero of the Riemann zeta function is ½.

Thus the non-trivial zeros should lie on the so-called critical line, ½ + it, where t is a real number and i is the imaginary unit. The Riemann zeta-function along the critical line is sometimes studied in terms of the Z-function, whose real zeros correspond to the zeros of the zeta-function on the critical line.

The Riemann hypothesis is one of the most important open problems of contemporary mathematics, mainly because a large number of deep and important other results have been proven under the condition that it holds. Most mathematicians believe the Riemann hypothesis to be true. (J. E. Littlewood and Atle Selberg have been reported as skeptical. Selberg's skepticism, if any, waned from his young days. In a 1989 paper, he suggested that an analogue should hold for a much wider class of functions, the Selberg class.) A $1,000,000 prize has been offered by the Clay Mathematics Institute for the first correct proof.



A value graph of zeta, that is, Re(zeta) vs. Im(zeta), along the critical line s = it + 1/2, with t running from 0 to 34.

Double Pendulum

In horology, a double pendulum is a system of two simple pendulums on a common mounting which move in anti-phase.

In mathematics, in the area of dynamical systems, a double pendulum is a pendulum with another pendulum attached to its end, and is a simple physical system that exhibits rich dynamic behavior. The motion of a double pendulum is governed by a set of coupled ordinary differential equations. Above a certain energy its motion is chaotic.



The double pendulum undergoes chaotic motion, and shows a sensitive dependence on initial conditions. The image to the right shows the amount of elapsed time before the pendulum "flips over", as a function of initial conditions.

BSDF

The definition of the BSDF (Bidirectional scattering distribution function) is not well standardized. The term was probably introduced in 1991 by Paul Heckbert. Most often it is used to name the general mathematical function which describes the way in which the light is scattered by a surface. However in practice this phenomenon is usually split into the reflected and transmitted components, which are then treated separately as BRDF (Bidirectional reflectance distribution function) and BTDF (Bidirectional transmittance distribution function).



* BSDF is a superset and the generalization of the BRDF and BTDF. The concept behind all BxDF functions could be described as a black box with the inputs being any two angles, one for incoming (incident) ray and the second one for the outgoing (reflected or transmitted) ray at a given point of the surface. The output of this black box is the value defining the ratio between the incoming and the outgoing light energy for the given couple of angles. The content of the black box may be a mathematical formula which more or less accurately tries to model and approximate the actual surface behavior or an algorithm which produces the output based on discrete samples of measured data. This implies that the function is 4 (+1) dimensional (4 values for 2 3D angles + 1 optional for wave length of the light), which means that it cannot be simply represented by 2D and not even by a 3D graph. Each 2D or 3D graph, sometimes seen in the literature, shows only a slice of the function.

* Some tend to use the term BSDF simply as a category name covering the whole family of BxDF functions.

* The term BSDF is sometimes used in a slightly different context, for the function describing the amount of the scatter (not scattered light), scatter being simply a function of the incident light angle. An example to illustrate this context: for perfectly lambertian surface the BSDF(angle)=const. This approach is used for instance to verify the output quality by the manufacturers of the glossy surfaces.

* Another recent usage of the term BSDF can be seen in some 3D packages, when vendors use it as a 'smart' category to encompass the simple well known cg algorithms like Phong, Blinn etc.

BDRF

The bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) is a 4-dimensional function that defines how light is reflected at an opaque surface. The function takes an incoming light direction, and outgoing direction, both defined with respect to the surface normal, and returns the ratio of reflected radiance exiting along to the irradiance incident on the surface from direction. Physically based BRDFs have additional restrictions, including Helmholtz reciprocity, and energy conservation. The BRDF has units sr-1, with steradians (sr) being a unit of solid angle.

The BRDF is a fundamental radiometric concept, and accordingly is used in computer graphics for photorealistic rendering of synthetic scenes, as well as in computer vision for many inverse problems such as object recognition.

Piri Reis (1465 – 1554)

Key to the Piri Reis' Map

Piri Reis (full name Hadji Muhiddin Piri Ibn Hadji Mehmed) (about 1465 – 1554 or 1555) was an Ottoman-Turkish admiral and cartographer born between 1465 and 1470 in Gallipoli on the Aegean coast of Turkey.

He is primarily known today for his maps and charts collected in his Kitab-ı Bahriye (Book of Navigation), a book which contains detailed information on navigation as well as extremely accurate charts describing the important ports and cities of the Mediterranean Sea. He gained fame as a cartographer when a small part of his first world map (prepared in 1513) was discovered in 1929 at Topkapı Palace in Istanbul. The most surprising aspect was the presence of the Americas on an Ottoman map, making it the first Turkish map ever drawn of the Americas -- although not the first ever, which was drawn by pilot and cartographer Juan de la Cosa in 1500 and is conserved in the naval museum (Museo Naval) in Madrid.



The most striking characteristic of the first world map (1513) of Piri Reis, however, is the level of accuracy in positioning the continents (particularly the relation between Africa and South America) which was unparalleled for its time. Even maps drawn decades later did not have such accurate positioning and proportions; a quality which can be observed in other maps of Piri Reis in his Kitab-ı Bahriye (Book of Navigation). Piri Reis' map is centered in the Sahara at the Tropic of Cancer latitude, and some believe it's also the oldest surviving map of Antarctica[citation needed], despite being drawn more than 3 centuries before the official discovery of that continent.

In 1528 Piri Reis drew a second world map, of which a small fragment showing Greenland and North America from Labrador and Newfoundland in the north to Florida, Cuba and parts of Central America in the south still survives.

8b/10b

Original paper by Franaszek and Widmer

In telecommunications, 8b/10b is a line code that maps 8-bit symbols to 10-bit symbols to achieve DC-balance and bounded disparity, and yet provide enough state changes to allow reasonable clock recovery. This means that the difference between the count of 1s and 0s in a string of at least 20 bits is no more than 2, and that there are not more than five 1s or 0s in a row. This helps to reduce the demand for the lower bandwidth limit of the channel necessary to transfer the signal.

The code was described in 1983 by Al Widmer and Peter Franaszek in the IBM Journal of Research and Development. IBM was issued a patent for the scheme the following year. IBM's patent notwithstanding, the method, implementation and goals are very similar to Group Code Recording (GCR) used on floppy disks in some computers during late 1970s/early 80s.

Technologies that use 8b/10b

Now that the IBM patent has expired, the scheme has become even more popular and is the default DC-free line code for new standards.

Among the areas in which 8B/10B encoding finds application are

* PCI Express
* IEEE 1394b
* Serial ATA
* SAS
* Fibre Channel
* SSA
* Gigabit Ethernet (except for the twisted pair based 1000Base-T)
* InfiniBand
* XAUI
* Serial RapidIO
* DVI and HDMI (Transition Minimized Differential Signaling)
* DVB Asynchronous Serial Interface (ASI)
* HyperTransport

Anti-satellite

Anti-satellite weapons (ASATs) are space weapons designed to destroy satellites for strategic military purposes. Currently, only the USA, the former USSR and the People's Republic of China are known to have developed these weapons, with India claiming the technical capability to develop such weapons. On January 11, 2007, China destroyed an old orbiting weather satellite, the world's first test since the 1980s.



USA-193 was an American spy satellite, which was launched on 14 December 2006 by a Delta II rocket, from Vandenberg Air Force Base. It was reported about a month after launch that the satellite had failed. In January 2008, it was reported that the satellite was decaying from orbit at a rate of 1,640 feet (500 m) per day. On 14 February 2008, it was reported that the US Navy had been instructed to fire an SM-3 ABM weapon at it, to act as an anti-satellite weapon.

This mission is different from "normal" ASAT operations in that the target vehicle is at a much lower altitude than would normally be the case. However, some analysts believes this is a coincidental, convenient reason for a passive response to the Chinese ASAT test carried out on January 11, 2007.

According to news media, the primary reason for destroying the satellite is the large amount of the highly toxic fuel hydrazine contained on board, which could pose environmental and health risks should any significant amount survive the reentry.

On Febuary 20, 2008, it was announced that the launch was carried out successfully and an explosion was observed consistent with the destruction of the hydrazine fuel tank.

WINDS

WINDS / Kizuna

WINDS (Wideband InterNetworking engineering test and Demonstration Satellite, also known as Kizuna), is a Japanese communication satellite. Launch was originally scheduled for 2007. The launch date was eventually set for 15 February 2008, however a problem detected in a second stage manoeuvring thruster delayed it to 23 February. Lift-off occurred at 08:55 GMT on 23 February, and the satellite separated from the carrier rocket, into a Geosynchronous transfer orbit at 09:23, launched by an H-IIA carrier rocket from the Tanegashima Space Centre. It will be used to relay the internet to Japanese homes and businesses, through Ka-Band signals. It will also develop technologies to be utilised by future Japanese communication spacecraft. It is part of Japan's i-Space programme, and is to be operated by JAXA and NICT.

JAXA claim that WINDS will be able to provide 155 Mb/s download speed to home users with 45-centimetre diameter satellite dishes, whilst providing industrial users, via 5-metre diameter dishes, with 1.2 Gb/s speeds.

WINDS has a launch mass of 4,850 kg, reducing to around 2,750 kg when in orbit. The spacecraft is 8 m x 3 m x 2 m in size, and its solar panels have a span of 21.5 metres. It has three-axis stabilisation, and a design life expectancy of five years.

KIZUNA will lead to ultra-high speed international Internet-based communications. The technology takes advantage of the fact that satellite communications are far-reaching, multicasting, and disaster-resistant. It will enable high-speed, large-volume data transmission, allowing ultra-fast domestic and international Internet-based communications, in particular between Japan and its neighboring countries in the Asia-Pacific region.
Ultra-fast satellite-based Internet-based communications will remove the so-called digital divide by providing high-speed Internet service in areas where the terrestrial communications infrastructure is poor. Among other uses, this will make possible great advances in telemedicine, which will bring high-quality medical treatment to remote areas, and in distance education, connecting students and teachers separated by great distances.

Project Constellation

NASA Project Constellation

Project Constellation is a NASA program to create a new generation of spacecraft for human spaceflight, consisting primarily of the Ares I and Ares V launch vehicles, the Orion crew capsule, the Earth Departure Stage and the Altair lunar lander. These spacecraft will be capable of performing a variety of missions, from Space Station resupply to lunar landings.

Most of the Constellation hardware is based on systems originally developed for the Space Shuttle, although Orion's two-part crew and service module system is heavily influenced by the earlier Apollo Spacecraft, and it uses engines derived from the Saturn V and Delta IV rockets. Proposed Constellation missions may employ both Earth Orbit Rendezvous and Lunar Orbit Rendezvous techniques.

Constellation Program

NASA has formed the Constellation Program to achieve the objectives of maintaining American presence in low Earth orbit, returning to the Moon for purposes of establishing an outpost, and laying the foundation to explore Mars and beyond in the first half of the 21st century. The Constellation Program's heritage rests on the successes and lessons learned from NASA’s previous human spaceflight programs: Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Space Shuttle and the International Space Station (ISS).

Spacecraft

Orion will consist of two main parts, a Crew Module (CM) similar to the Apollo Command Module capable of holding four to six crew members, and a cylindrical Service Module (SM) containing the primary propulsion systems and consumable supplies. The Orion CM will be reusable for up to 10 flights, allowing NASA to construct a fleet of Orion CMs.

Current plans call for the phased introduction of Orion variants tailored for specific missions. The Block I Orion will be employed for ISS crew rotation and resupply and other Earth orbit missions, while the Block II and III variants will be designed for deep-space exploration.

Launch vehicles

As currently envisioned, the Orion spacecraft will be launched into a low earth orbit using the proposed Ares I rocket (the "Stick"). Formerly referred to as the Crew Launch Vehicle (CLV), the Ares I consists of a single Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) derived from the boosters used in the Space Shuttle system, connected at its upper end by an interstage support assembly to a new liquid-fueled second stage powered by an uprated Apollo-era J-2X rocket engine. The Orion spacecraft would be lifted into orbit atop this "stack", while a larger launch vehicle (the proposed Ares V) would be used to launch the heavier Earth Departure Stage and Altair.

In January 2007, NASA announced that a different launch vehicle design, the Ares IV, was actively under consideration for the program. If chosen, the Ares IV might replace both the Ares I and the Ares V launch vehicles for some Constellation launches at later dates, or all of them altogether.

Lockheed YF-12

National Museum of USAF Lockheed YF-12

The Lockheed YF-12 was an American prototype interceptor aircraft, which the United States Air Force evaluated as a development of the CIA's highly-secret A-12 OXCART that also spawned the now-famous SR-71 Blackbird.

Design and development

The United States Air Force (USAF) YF-12 program was a development of the Lockheed A-12 OXCART spy plane designed for the CIA and first flown 26 April 1962, the first YF-12A flew on 7 August 1963. The existence of the aircraft was not officially revealed until 29 February 1964. Lockheed was able to interest the Air Force in the project after the United States Air Force had been forced to cancel the XF-108 Rapier, a Mach 3-capable interceptor intended to replace the F-106 Delta Dart in service. It was pointed out that an aircraft based on the A-12 would provide a less costly alternative to the XF-108, since much of the design and development work on the YF-12 had already been done and paid for. In 1960, the USAF agreed to take the 11th through 13th slots on the A-12 production line and have them completed in the YF-12A interceptor configuration.

The main changes involved modifying the aircraft's nose to accommodate the Hughes AN/ASG-18 fire-control radar originally developed for the XF-108, and the addition of a second cockpit for a crewmember to operate the fire control radar. The nose modifications changed the aircraft's aerodynamics enough to require ventral fins to be mounted under the fuselage and engine nacelles to maintain stability. Finally, bays previously used to house the A-12's reconnaissance equipment were converted to carry four Hughes AIM-47A (GAR-9) missiles.

SPECIFICATIONS:

Span: 55 ft. 7 in.
Length: 101 ft.
Height: 18 ft. 6 in.
Weight: 127,000 lbs. loaded
Armament: Three Hughes AIM-47A missiles
Engines: Two Pratt & Whitney J58s of 32,000 lbs. thrust each with afterburner
Crew: Two

PERFORMANCE:
Maximum speed: Mach 3+
Range: 2,000+ miles
Service ceiling: Above 80,000 ft.

Ghost In The Shell SAC: SSS

Kôkaku kidôtai: Stand Alone Complex Solid State Society

Production I.G. GITS SAC SSS

Manga GITS SAC SSS

Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. Solid State Society (S.A.C. Solid State Society, Kōkaku Kidōtai: Solid State Society) is the 2006 anime film based on the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex series, which is based on Masamune Shirow's manga Ghost in the Shell. It was produced by Production I.G, who announced the film at the 2006 Tokyo Anime Fair, and was directed by Kenji Kamiyama.

In order to provide theatrical quality, the film premiered on the Japanese satellite PPV platform SKY PerfecTV! Perfect Choice ch160, on September 1, 2006. It also aired in Japan on the anime satellite TV network Animax starting May 27, 2007. The film was also released on DVD in Japan on November 24, 2006 and was released in the U.S. by Bandai Entertainment and Manga Entertainment, in a normal and limited edition on July 3, 2007. It was announced at Anime Expo 2006 that Solid State Society is not scheduled to be the final iteration of the Stand Alone Complex series.

A.D. 2034. It has been two years since Motoko Kusanagi left Section 9. Togusa is now the new leader of the team, that has considerably increased its appointed personnel. The expanded new Section 9 confronts a rash of complicated incidents, and investigations reveal that an ultra-wizard hacker named the Puppeteer is behind the entire series of events.

In the midst of all, Batou, who was stalking the case on a separate track, encounters Motoko. She goes away after saying, "Stay away from the Solid State Society." Batou is left with a doubt in his mind. Could Motoko be the the Puppeteer?

The series of intriguing incidents that Section 9 faces gradually link together almost artistically. Who is the Puppeteer? What will happen to Batou's relationship with Motoko? What is the full truth behind this carefully planned perfect crime? And what will the outcome be? Mysteries surround the Solid State Society...

i386

Intel Museum

i386 at CPU-Info

The Intel386 is a microprocessor which has been used as the central processing unit (CPU) of many personal computers since 1986. During its design phase the processor was code-named simply "P3", the third-generation processor in the x86 line, but is normally referred to as either i386 or just 386. The 80386 operated at about 5 million instructions per second (MIPS) to 11.4 MIPS for the 33 MHz model. It was the first x86 processor to have a 32-bit architecture, with a basic programming model that has remained virtually unchanged for over twenty years and remains completely backward compatible. Successively newer implementations of this same architecture have become literally several hundred times faster than the original i386 chip during these years.

Designed and manufactured by Intel, the i386 processor was taped-out in October of 1985. Intel decided against producing the chip before that date, as the cost of production would have been uneconomical. Full-function chips were first delivered to customers in 1986. Motherboards for 386-based computer systems were highly elaborate and expensive to produce, but were rationalized upon the 386's mainstream adoption. The first personal computer to make use of the 386 was designed and manufactured by Compaq, and Andy Grove, Intel's CEO at the time, made the decision to single-source the processor, a decision that was ultimately crucial to both the processor's and Intel's success in the market.

The range of processors compatible with the 80386 is often collectively termed x86 or the i386 architecture; today, Intel prefers the name IA-32 however.

In May 2006 Intel announced that production of the 386 would cease at the end of September 2007. Although it had long been obsolete as a personal computer CPU, Intel, and others, had continued to manufacture the chip for embedded systems, including aerospace.

Everybody Loves Raymond

Everybody Loves Raymond 1996 - 2005 IMDb

Everybody Loves Raymond is an Emmy, SAG, WGA winning and Golden Globe nominated American sitcom, originally broadcast on CBS from September 13, 1996 to May 16, 2005. Many of the situations from the show are based on the real-life experiences of Ray Romano (who is represented by the Ray Barone character he plays) and the writing staff. The main characters on the show are also loosely based on Romano's family members. It is one of the most critically acclaimed American sitcoms of its time. Everybody Loves Raymond was nominated for and won many awards.

Show background

The show revolves around the life of Italian-American Ray Barone, a newspaper sportswriter from Lynbrook, Long Island. Ray lives with his wife, Debra Barone, their daughter, Ally, and their identical twin sons, Michael and Geoffrey. Ray's parents and brother Robert frequently make their presence known to the frustration of Ray and especially Debra. Unfortunately for Ray, he always has to hear about it from Debra. A passive-aggressive woman, Debra particularly finds herself at odds with Ray's mother, Marie. Ray often finds himself in the middle of all the problems and arguments. His biggest nemesis is Robert, who is insecure about Ray being the favorite son. Although Robert and Ray are frequently seen fighting like children and picking on each other, the brothers are very devoted to each other. Robert frequently calls Ray "Cubby" and stands up for him, while Ray has a great admiration for Robert, who is a police officer. One very touching episode had Ray taking care of Robert after he was wounded in the line of duty. Their father, Frank, is very tough and does not like to show his feelings, but through the years several episodes were crafted to show how much he loves his family. Ray and Debra have their share of marital disagreements, with Debra frequently denying Ray sex, and Ray prefers watching sports television to talking to his wife. A recurring theme on the show has them having a long interaction each night while in bed, just before going to sleep, and sometimes there is a sweetness between them.

Main cast

* Ray Barone (Ray Romano)
* Debra Barone (Patricia Heaton)
* Robert Barone (Brad Garrett)
* Marie Barone (Doris Roberts)
* Frank Barone (Peter Boyle)

Achievements

Bravo placed the Barone family at number 41 on their list of 100 greatest TV icons of all time TV Land placed Frank's exclamation 'Holy Crap' at number 79 on their list of 100 greatest catchphrases of all time. TV Land and TV Guide placed Marie's vagina sculpture at number 62 on their list of 100 most unexpected moments in TV history. TV Guide placed Ray Barone at number 10 on their list of 50 greatest TV dads of all time.

Montauk, New York

Montauk, New York 41°2′18″N 71°57′2″W
town.east-hampton.ny.us

Montauk is a hamlet (and census-designated place) in Suffolk County, New York on the South Shore of Long Island. As of the United States 2000 Census, the hamlet population was 3,851. It is the easternmost area in Long Island, and thus the easternmost area in New York State.

Strategically located on the tip of the South Fork, Suffolk County, New York peninsula it has been used as an Army, Navy, Coast Guard and Air Force base. Located 20 miles off the Connecticut coast, it is home to the largest commercial and recreational fishing fleet in New York State.

The Montauk Point Lighthouse was the first lighthouse in New York state and is the fourth oldest active lighthouse in the United States.

Montauk is a major tourist destination and it boasts six state parks. It is particularly famous for its fishing (claiming to have more world saltwater fishing records than any other port in the world) and surfing.

The Deep Hollow Ranch is the oldest cattle ranch in the United States.

Montauk is in the Town of East Hampton.

Maggie Cheung

Maggie Cheung (born September 20, 1964) is a multi award-winning Chinese actress from Hong Kong. Raised in England, she has over 80 films to her credit since starting her career in 1983.

Biography

Born in Hong Kong, Maggie Cheung traces her ancestry to Shanghai, China. Her merchant-class family emigrated from Hong Kong to the United Kingdom when she was a child. Cheung spent part of her childhood and adolescence in the UK. She returned to Hong Kong in 1982 for vacation, but ended up staying for modeling assignments. Soon she got a salesgirl job at a Japanese department store as well. In 1983, she entered the Miss Hong Kong beauty pageant contest. She won second place and also bagged the Miss Photogenic award. She was a semi-finalist in the Miss World pageant the same year.

Prior to 1988, Maggie’s screen appearance was often limited to eye candy roles. One of Cheung's notable movie roles then is that of "Mei", the girlfriend of police detective "Kevin" Chan Ka Kui in Jackie Chan's Police Story movies (however, she did not reprise the role in Police Story 4: First Strike or New Police Story). Maggie frequently cited her performance in the movie As Tears Go By (1988), her first of many collaborations with film director Wong Kar-Wai 王家衛, as the piece that truly began her serious acting career. Maggie Cheung is famous for being a talented multi-lingual actress. In Centre Stage, she performed in Mandarin, Cantonese and Shanghainese fluently, switching languages with ease. In Clean, she performed in fluent English, Parisian French, Cantonese and a smattering of Mandarin. Unlike most traditional actors in Hong Kong who are Cantonese monolingual, she is a polyglot as a result of her cosmopolitan upbringing.

Audiences outside Asia have become increasingly familiar with her work, including her roles in Centre Stage (as Ruan Lingyu), In the Mood for Love, Irma Vep, 2046, Hero, and, most recently, Clean.

She married French director Olivier Assayas in 1998 but divorced him in 2001. Their relationship remained amicable, however, as in 2004 Cheung made her award-winning movie Clean with him. As part of her portrayal of the drug-addicted aspiring singer Emily Wang in Clean, Maggie Cheung performed songs written by David Roback of Mazzy Star.

On 7 February 2007, The New York Times rated Maggie Cheung as one of the 22 Great Performers in 2006 for her Cannes winning role Emily in Clean. After 25 years of making movies, Cheung is deciding to retire from acting and pursue a career as a film composer. She allows that there might be room for an occasional comedic role, but she would like to paint and compose music, after fulfilling her acting potential.

Awards

Hong Kong Film Awards
Best Actress
1989 A Fishy Story
1992 Centre Stage
1996 Comrades: Almost a Love Story
1998 The Soong Sisters
2001 In the Mood for Love

Golden Bauhinia Awards
Best Actress
1996 Comrades: Almost a Love Story

Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards
Best Actress
1996 Comrades: Almost a Love Story

Golden Horse Awards
Best Actress
1989 Full Moon in New York
1990 Red Dust
1991 Centre Stage
1996 Comrades: Almost a Love Story
2000 In the Mood for Love

Other Awards

Berlin International Film Festival
Best Actress
1992 Centre Stage

Cannes Film Festival
Best Actress
2004 Clean

Hawaii International Film Festival
Award for Achievement in Acting

HDRI

High Dynamic Range Image and Video Processing

In computer graphics and photography, high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of exposures (the range of values between light and dark areas) than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention of HDRI is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to shadows.

HDRI was originally developed for use with purely computer-generated images. Later, methods were developed to produce a high dynamic range image from a set of photographs taken with a range of exposures. With the rising popularity of digital cameras and easy-to-use desktop software, the term "HDR" is now popularly used to refer to the process of tone mapping together with bracketed exposures of normal digital images, giving the end result a high, often exaggerated dynamic range. This composite technique is different from, and generally of lower quality than, the production of an image from a single exposure of a sensor that has a native high dynamic range. Tone mapping is also used to display HDR images on devices with a low native dynamic range, such as a computer screen.

OpenGL

OpenGL

OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a standard specification defining a cross-language cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 2D and 3D computer graphics. The interface consists of over 250 different function calls which can be used to draw complex three-dimensional scenes from simple primitives. OpenGL was developed by Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) in 1992 and is widely used in CAD, virtual reality, scientific visualization, information visualization, and flight simulation. It is also used in video games, where it competes with Direct3D on Microsoft Windows platforms.

History

In the 1980s, developing software that could function with a wide range of graphics hardware was a real challenge. Software developers wrote custom interfaces and drivers for each piece of hardware. This was expensive and resulted in much duplication of effort.

By the early 1990s, Silicon Graphics (SGI) was a leader in 3D graphics for workstations. Their IRIS GL API was considered the state of the art and became the de facto industry standard, overshadowing the open standards-based PHIGS. This was because IRIS GL was considered easier to use, and because it supported immediate mode rendering. By contrast, PHIGS was considered difficult to use and outdated in terms of functionality.

SGI's competitors (including Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and IBM) were also able to bring to market 3D hardware, supported by extensions made to the PHIGS standard. This in turn caused SGI market share to weaken as more 3D graphics hardware suppliers entered the market. In an effort to influence the market, SGI decided to turn the IrisGL API into an open standard.

SGI considered that the IrisGL API itself wasn't suitable for opening due to licensing and patent issues. Also, the IrisGL had API functions that were not relevant to 3D graphics. For example, it included a windowing, keyboard and mouse API, in part because it was developed before the X Window System and Sun's NeWS systems were developed.

In addition, SGI had a large number of software customers; by changing to the OpenGL API they planned to keep their customers locked onto SGI (and IBM) hardware for a few years while market support for OpenGL matured. Meanwhile, SGI would continue to try to maintain their customers tied to SGI hardware by developing the advanced and proprietary Iris Inventor and Iris Performer programming APIs.

As a result, SGI released the OpenGL standard.

The OpenGL standardised access to hardware, and pushed the development responsibility of hardware interface programs, sometimes called device drivers, to hardware manufacturers and delegated windowing functions to the underlying operating system. With so many different kinds of graphic hardware, getting them all to speak the same language in this way had a remarkable impact by giving software developers a higher level platform for 3D-software development.

In 1992, SGI led the creation of the OpenGL architectural review board (OpenGL ARB), the group of companies that would maintain and expand the OpenGL specification for years to come. OpenGL evolved from (and is very similar in style to) SGI's earlier 3D interface, IrisGL. One of the restrictions of IrisGL was that it only provided access to features supported by the underlying hardware. If the graphics hardware did not support a feature, then the application could not use it. OpenGL overcame this problem by providing support in software for features unsupported by hardware, allowing applications to use advanced graphics on relatively low-powered systems.

In 1994 SGI played with the idea of releasing something called "OpenGL++" which included elements such as a scene-graph API (presumably based around their Performer technology). The specification was circulated among a few interested parties – but never turned into a product.

Microsoft released Direct3D in 1995, which would become the main competitor of OpenGL. On 17 December 1997, Microsoft and SGI initiated the Fahrenheit project, which was a joint effort with the goal of unifying the OpenGL and Direct3D interfaces (and adding a scene-graph API too). In 1998 Hewlett-Packard joined the project. It initially showed some promise of bringing order to the world of interactive 3D computer graphics APIs, but on account of financial constraints at SGI, strategic reasons at Microsoft, and general lack of industry support, it was abandoned in 1999.

SU-37

Sukhoi

Youtube.com SU-37 search

The Sukhoi Su-37 is a single-seat, all-weather, fighter and ground attack prototype aircraft, derived from the Su-27 'Flanker'. The Su-27 is a Russian fourth generation jet aircraft that has been exported to over 20 nations. The Su-37 test aircraft made its maiden flight in April 1996 from the Zhukovsky flight testing center near Moscow. The Su-37 is referred to as the Terminator.

The Su-37 includes several updates over the Su-27, including all-weather multi-mode passive electronically scanned array radar with synthetic aperture, terrain avoidance, terrain mapping and a rear facing radar. The airframe includes a percentage of parts made from composites, unlike the all-metal Su-27. Additionally, the Su-37 incorporates the AL-37FU engines equipped with thrust vectoring. The Su-37’s nozzles are variable in pitch only and travel plus or minus 15 degrees, but they can be operated differentially to provide a rolling moment.



In the cockpit the aircraft is the first Russian fighter aircraft with the Hands On Throttle and Stick, or HOTAS, system. The weapon system shares much with the Su-30"MK", but it lacks the large display in the back cockpit that is utilized by the weapons system officer. The cockpit features four multi-function cockpit displays instead of dial type analogue instruments and has an inclined (30 degree) pilot ejection seat. The two-grip flying control configuration was designed to prevent the pilot from flailing around when doing the manoeuvers associated with the vectored-thrust engines. Both the fixed throttle and the side-stick controller provide secure points for the pilot to brace his hands.

The Su-37 also stores a radar in the tailcone of the plane that allows it to fire missiles behind the plane.

The engine not only incorporates 2D TVC but also is tough and resistant to engine surge even during classic, inverted and flat spins, giving better reliability and maneuverability, such as when the AOA is as high as 180 degrees.

The Su-37 appeared at the 1996 Farnborough air show piloted by Sukhoi test pilot Eugeny Frolov. During the performance, the Su-37 was flipped on its back while flying at 350 km/h (217 mph) so that it faced the opposite direction, inverted and almost stationary. After pausing for two seconds the thrust vectoring was used to complete a 360 degree rotation and the aircraft moved off in its original direction of flight at only 60 km/h (37 mph).

The Su-37 can carry air-to-air and air-to-surface weapons on 12 stations. The number of missiles and bombs carried can be increased to 14 with the use of multi-payload racks.

Russia has not ordered Su-37s, but it might find customers abroad, a market that now constitutes a sizable share of Sukhoi’s income. Several prototypes have been built, but the aircraft is not in production.

SGI Indy

SGI Indy Info

Introduced in 1993, the Indy was the fruit of SGI's effort to muscle into the market for desktop publishing, low-end CAD, and multimedia. At the time, the market was mostly dominated by Apple. The Indy was the first computer to include a digital video camera, and was built with a (then) forward-looking architecture including an on-board ISDN adapter. With the inclusion of analog and digital I/O, SCSI, and standard composite and S-Video inputs, the Indy really was a multimedia machine.



At the beginning of its life, the Indy came standard with 16MB of RAM. IRIX 5.1, the first OS for the Indy, did not take full advantage of the hardware due to inadequate memory management. SGI realized this and quickly increased the base specification to 32 MB, at considerable cost. Subsequent IRIX releases made huge improvements in memory usage. The latest release of IRIX available for the Indy workstations is 6.5.22.