Re: West coast mainline
By other definitions Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester are in the south.
7096 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Feb 2011
Cosmos 2543 sidled up to another Russian satellite before releasing the object that moved at around 700 km/h.
Must be 700km/h relative velocity, because the sats in LEO are moving around their orbital path at over 17500 mph.
700kmh per hour at that distance from the earth is virtual straight down to re-entry,
Right now, when Apple have announced that their MacBooks will be using their own CPUs that are based on ARM cores, I’m fairly sure that other PC makers will follow and the progress of ARM moving but from small device territory and into productivity devices will be followed by makers of other computers for Windows and Linux etc. They will use SOC components from companies like NVidia who have the existing skills to supply and adapt GPU drivers.
There are some absolutely wonderful phones out there for reasonable money, superbly executed hardware. Problem is that these lovely gadgets run a low rent OS, hence the continued popularity of the expensive iPhones.
Fortunately, the expense of these Apple devices is partly hidden when it is a monthly payment and not an upfront cost, which is good for me because I can pick them up on the cheapo when they become available on the used market.
Cheap phone, avoid Android. win win.
"As I understand it Enigma was never cracked."
Enigma was understood enough so that reel settings could be deduced. And when reel settings for a particular day were known, messages from that day could be read, even if they had to read them days or weeks later.
It took time for the signal listening posts to transcribe the morse and get it off to Bletchley and its outstations and the Americans at Eastcote.
It took thousands of staff working 24x7 to operate the systems at Bletchley that mined all the decoded messages and turn them into useful intelligence.
Many of the comments on here are asserting information that doesn't agree with the Bletchley Park version.
As I understand it, the USA built a single steelworks in Pennsylvania with more capacity than all the steelworks in Europe combined. Nazis must have realised that they were up shit creek when that kind of capacity joined the fight against them.
Although it has to be said that in terms of technology, pilot less bobs such as V1, sub-orbital ballistic missile such as V2 and actual in service jets such as ME262 and ME163 Komet they were focused more on wonder weapons.
Constant bombing by the USAAF and RAF disrupted their production of anything and the P51 log range escorts also made life hard for them. The combined efforts of most of the world is a really daft opponent to take on.
Attempting to defend Poland by invading to face the Wehrmacht from the Baltic would have been fucking stupid, the BEF was ill-equipped to face them on their own doorstep. There could not have been a Dunkirk miracle from GDansk, there would be no army left and the war in Europe would have been over in 1940. Thousands of deaths went into defeating the Nazis and eventually ridding them from Europe. The allies were barely able to keep Europe out of Soviet hands afterwards, so expectations of what was possible need to be a bit more pragmatic.
The Polish contribution is very well acknowledged at Bletchley.
What is not generally acknowledged is that Bletchley had to repeatedly break enigma again and again in its different versions, and spent months blind to naval enigma messages until the RN managed to capture a code book.
Then Bletchley Bille Tutte also reverse engineered the Lorenz cipher, a greater feat and with the work of Tommy Flowers at Dollis Hill in London they computerised the process of discovering reel settings. The code breaking was the key to it all but the real effort in collating hundreds of encrypted messages per day from a network of listening stations, and team of couriers into an industrial operation involving 24x7 shifts of many thousands of people to mine the messages and sift-pan them for gold. It’s too often portrayed as a couple of ramshackle huts with a few tank-topped boffins chewing pencils and scratching heads. A visit will open the eyes to the huge concrete blocks designed to look like a hospital. The processing of information that happened there was industrial scale. Sure the first commercial enigma cracks were important but it was a far bigger show than that.
Of course we all know but are ashamed to admit that what really happened was an American GI showed up there chewing gum, wearing aviator shades and hat cocked at a jaunty angle, looked at a couple of crypts, changed a couple of wires on a bombe and suddenly everything started working 100 times better. He then declared that this was what he was talking about and took the prettiest WREN away with him sweet talking promises of nylon stockings and ration busting quantities of canned beef and Hershey’s chocolate.
“ Anyway always good to see stuff from space anybody can access.”
ISS has been doing amateur radio packet and voice for years. There are numerous other satellites that anyone can take a downlink from, starting with NOAA and on up from there. Two way space comes is also available through AMSAT work and these are all examples of direct downlink and in the case of AMSAT uplink (even images). Not through the receiving equipment at the WebSDR sites. If You want to work space, it’s all there ready and has been all along. If you look at YouTube there are videos of people working Sats using £20 Chinese transceivers.
The WebSDR software out of the Netherlands is absolutely brilliant, I do hope the various sites, which are volunteer operated are not swamped.
I plug the iPhone into anything to charge it. PC or laptop outlet, the car, any old charger, USB outlets provided on buses, modern furniture and in public places. They all work and they all work with a charger cable from Poundland.
Apple are not going to supply the phone that can’t be charged from the USB socket in a plane seat.
Databases like MongoDB take JSON data which in the end is just a text file.
Being unstructured it’s less complicated to partition and shard out at the database level. In practice the scaling out with hardware, redundancy and the nodes required to keep track of where your data is gets fiddly very quickly. Especially if you are in cloud and you need to make sure you are not having redundant nodes too close together.
I use a FlightRadar often and the number of flights was much lower during the height of March April May and is now picking up but still much less busy than this time last year. I also live under a busy airport approach and life is much quieter right now. I enjoy watching the air traffic so I actually miss the planes. I don’t mind the noise at all.