Researchers have unearthed hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets, but many remain untranslated. Translating an ancient language is a time-intensive process, and only a few hundred experts are qualified to perform it. A recent study describes a new AI that produces high-quality translations of ancient texts.
The ancient Romans were master builders and engineers, perhaps most famously represented by the still-functional aqueducts. And those architectural marvels rely on a unique construction material: pozzolanic concrete, a spectacularly durable material that gave Roman structures their incredible strength.
Even today, one of their structures – the Pantheon, still intact and nearly 2,000 years old – holds the record for the world's largest dome of unreinforced concrete.
The properties of this concrete have generally been attributed to its ingredients: pozzolana, a mix of volcanic ash – named after the Italian city of Pozzuoli, where a significant deposit of it can be found – and lime. When mixed with water, the two materials can react to produce strong concrete.
But that, as it turns out, is not the whole story. An international team of researchers led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that not only are the materials slightly different from what we may have thought, but the techniques used to mix them were also different.
The smoking guns were small, white chunks of lime that can be found in what seems to be otherwise well-mixed concrete. The presence of these chunks had previously been attributed to poor mixing or materials, but that did not make sense to materials scientist Admir Masic of MIT. //
One of the questions in mind was the nature of the lime used. The standard understanding of pozzolanic concrete is that it uses slaked lime. First, limestone is heated at high temperatures to produce a highly reactive caustic powder called quicklime, or calcium oxide.
Mixing quicklime with water produces slaked lime, or calcium hydroxide: a slightly less reactive, less caustic paste. According to theory, it was this slaked lime that ancient Romans mixed with the pozzolana.
Based on the team's analysis, the lime clasts in their samples are not consistent with this method. Rather, Roman concrete was probably made by mixing the quicklime directly with the pozzolana and water at extremely high temperatures, by itself or in addition to slaked lime, a process the team calls "hot mixing" that results in the lime clasts.
"The benefits of hot mixing are twofold," Masic said.
"First, when the overall concrete is heated to high temperatures, it allows chemistries that are not possible if you only used slaked lime, producing high-temperature-associated compounds that would not otherwise form. Second, this increased temperature significantly reduces curing and setting times since all the reactions are accelerated, allowing for much faster construction."
And it has another benefit: The lime clasts give the concrete remarkable self-healing abilities.
When cracks form in the concrete, they preferentially travel to the lime clasts, which have a higher surface area than other particles in the matrix. When water gets into the crack, it reacts with the lime to form a solution rich in calcium that dries and hardens as calcium carbonate, gluing the crack back together and preventing it from spreading further. //
It could also explain why Roman concrete from seawalls built 2,000 years ago has survived intact for millennia despite the ocean's constant battering.
I am writing this on the Book 8088, an utterly bizarre $200-ish imported system that uses a processor from 1984, a custom motherboard design, and a bunch of cobbled-together parts to approximate the specs of the original IBM PC 5150 from 1981. It's running at a blazing-fast speed of 4.77 MHz, at least when it's not in TURBO MODE, and it has a generous helping of 640KB (yes, kilobytes) of system memory. (If you can't buy one now, keep an eye on the listing because it has blinked into and out of stock a few times over the last few weeks).
This is a weird computer, even by the standards of all the other weird computers I've gotten my hands on. Its keyboard is cramped, it comes with a stolen BIOS and stolen software, and everything is always just slow, slow, slow. Its speakers keep crackling unhappily at me for no readily apparent reason. Its tiny, low-resolution LCD screen is hopelessly dim.
Tech support is supplied by the AliExpress seller in China, with both sides relying on automated translation to bridge the language gap. And I do need a little tech support because the system isn't quite working as promised, and the hardware that is working mostly isn't configured optimally.
And yet! The Book 8088 remains an interesting technological achievement, a genuine IBM PC compatible that shares a lot in common with my first ancient, terrible personal computer. I'm not sure it's a good buy, even for retro-tech die-hards who eat and breathe this sort of thing. But that doesn't mean it hasn't been a ton of fun to explore. //
Intel's first x86 processor was the 8086, which was released in mid-1978. It was the company's first 16-bit processor at a time when most were still 8-bit, and it could execute assembly code written for Intel's earlier 8008, 8080, and 8085 chips. But this same relatively forward-looking design made it more expensive to use, so it didn't become the chip that would help the x86 architecture take over the computing world.
That honor went to 1979's 8088, a cut-down version of the 8086 that could execute the same code and remained a 16-bit chip internally but which used an 8-bit external data bus. Halving the speed at which the CPU could communicate with the rest of the system obviously hurt performance, but it also meant that manufacturers could continue using it with parts made for older, cheaper 8-bit computer designs.
One of those companies was IBM.
The original x86 PC was a project that was turned around inside of a year by a small team within IBM, and a decision to use an "open" architecture (not in the modern "open-source" sense but in the "modular, non-proprietary hardware with expansion slots that any other company can develop for" sense) was done partly out of expediency. It shipped with an 8088, a 5.25-inch drive for 360KB 5.25-inch floppy disks, no hard drive, and 16KB of RAM. The original press release quaintly calls them "characters of memory" and numbers them in bytes; the MacBook Air I'm editing this on has 17,179,869,184 characters of memory. //
The IBM PC's design is simple enough that retro-tech hobbyists have successfully created modern open-source versions of its hardware and BIOS. The most notable work comes from Sergey Kiselev, who maintains an open-source BIOS and some open-source designs for motherboards and ISA expansion cards; newer chips have made it possible to condense the IBM 5150, its various expansion cards, and even a couple of newer amenities into a board small enough to fit into the Book 8088's tiny, chunky frame. The Book 8088 benefits from all of this work, though; at a bare minimum, its creators are violating the GPL license by modifying Kiselev's BIOS and removing his name from it (we confirmed this by looking at the BIOS files sent by the seller).
"While my work is open source, and I don't mind people using it in their projects, I do care deeply about the principles of open source software development and licensing," Kiselev wrote to Ars. "And whoever manufacturers this machine bluntly violates copyright law and licensing."
The Book 8088 also ships with MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.0, along with other software; at this point, all of this stuff is broadly classified as "abandonware" and is freely available from WinWorldPC and other sites without protest from Microsoft, but allowing old software to stay up for historical and archival purposes isn't the same as inviting people to sell it on new hardware.
http://go.redirectingat.com/?id=100098X1555750&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwinworldpc.com%2Fhome&sref=rss
An esteemed army officer in the ancient Roman Republic, Horatius Cocles lived in a legendary period of Rome during the late sixth century. Horatius was known for defending one of Rome's most famous bridges, the Pons Sublicius, during the war between Rome and Clusium. The heroic leader was known for fighting against Etruscan invaders such as Lars Porsena and his invading army. Horatius was known as a courageous and brave leader of the Roman army. //
Macaulay's Horatius at the Bridge
The following poem by Thomas Babington Macaulay is a memorable ballad that recounts the courage of Horatius Cocles in his battle with the Roman army against the Etruscans.
One of the biggest computing inventions of all time, courtesy of Xerox PARC. //
Although watching TV shows from the 1970s suggests otherwise, the era wasn't completely devoid of all things resembling modern communication systems. Sure, the 50Kbps modems that the ARPANET ran on were the size of refrigerators, and the widely used Bell 103 modems only transferred 300 bits per second. But long-distance digital communication was common enough, relative to the number of computers deployed. Terminals could also be hooked up to mainframe and minicomputers over relatively short distances with simple serial lines or with more complex multidrop systems. This was all well known; what was new in the '70s was the local area network (LAN). But how to connect all these machines? //
A token network's complexity makes it vulnerable to a number of failure modes, but such networks do have the advantage that performance is deterministic; it can be calculated precisely in advance, which is important in certain applications.
But in the end it was Ethernet that won the battle for LAN standardization through a combination of standards body politics and a clever, minimalist—and thus cheap to implement—design. It went on to obliterate the competition by seeking out and assimilating higher bitrate protocols and adding their technological distinctiveness to its own. Decades later, it had become ubiquitous.
If you've ever looked at the network cable protruding from your computer and wondered how Ethernet got started, how it has lasted so long, and how it works, wonder no more: here's the story. //
Other LAN technologies use extensive mechanisms to arbitrate access to the shared communication medium. Not Ethernet. I'm tempted to use the expression "the lunatics run the asylum," but that would be unfair to the clever distributed control mechanism developed at PARC. I'm sure that the mainframe and minicomputer makers of the era thought the asylum analogy wasn't far off, though. //
in their paper from 1976 describing the experimental 3Mbps Ethernet, Bob Metcalfe and David Boggs showed that for packets of 500 bytes and larger, more than 95 percent of the network's capacity is used for successful transmissions, even if 256 computers all continuously have data to transmit. Pretty clever. //
It's hard to believe now, but in the early 1980s, 10Mbps Ethernet was very fast. Think about it: is there any other 30-year-old technology still present in current computers? 300 baud modems? 500 ns memory? Daisy wheel printers? But even today, 10Mbps is not an entirely unusable speed, and it's still part of the 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet interfaces in our computers. //
It's truly mindboggling that Ethernet managed to survive 30 years in production, increasing its speed by no less than four orders of magnitude. This means that a 100GE system sends an entire packet (well, if it's 1212 bytes long) in the time that the original 10Mbps Ethernet sends a single bit. In those 30 years, all aspects of Ethernet were changed: its MAC procedure, the bit encoding, the wiring... only the packet format has remained the same—which ironically is the part of the IEEE standard that's widely ignored in favor of the slightly different DIX 2.0 standard.
DCRoss
Ars Scholae Palatinae
11y
960
Yesterday at 11:36 AM
#24
MTSkibum said:
Somewhere a web developer chose an arbitrary nvarchar length for the password and is storing it unencrypted in a sql database.That is how you ended up with the maximum password length.
There's more to the story, but the relevant part is that way back in 1976 UNIX systems hashed passwords with a DES based algorithm which was limited to two characters of salt and eight characters of password. It wasn't until 1994 that Paul Henning-Kemp replaced this with a more advanced hash based on MD5 for FreeBSD, and this was adopted by just about everybody. However, not only did applications keep using the old crypt(3) implementation long after that, they also stuck with the idea that having an eight character limit on your password was reasonable, and even that if you used a more secure algorithm that sixteen was fair.
With this in mind, setting fixed length fields for passwords or password hashes was considered acceptable for far longer than it should have been.
Jack Devanney
Jun 9
Teller like most of us was a bundle of contradictions. He was certainly aware that a major release from an NPP would provide ammunition to those who wanted to shut down weapon testing, which he thought was absolutely necessary to keep up with the Soviets.
Here's a mind-blowing fact. Teller, Leo Szilard, John vonNeumann and Eugene Wigner, a sizable proportion of the American WWII brain trust, all graduated from the same Budapest high school within a few years of each other. That must have been a hell of a high school.
No wonder Teller wanted to upgrade American education.
Rod Adams
Jun 9
Jack - Didn't some of the other members of the Manhattan project refer to the Hungarians as "The Martians", implying that their skills were out of this world?
Jack Devanney
Jun 9
The story is that the Manhattan Project greats were having lunch at the University of Chicago. Fermi is speculating about earth being visited by a master race, possibly from Mars. Szilard chimes in "They are already here, disguised as Hungarians". He had a point, but apparently the Martians used this one high school as a staging point.
In the early 1960s Soviet Union sold titanium to the US believing they needed it for Pizza Ovens but instead they used it to build the iconic SR-71 Blackbird Mach 3+ spy plane
After all, they fraudulently possibly told their comrades that the United States was a lazy country that probably couldn’t even cook for itself. //
Titanium procurement during the Cold War was so vital to the US’ goal of defeating the Soviet Union that it had to secretly buy the metal from the very country it sought to vanquish. It was 1960 and Washington needed spy planes that could avoid detection in Soviet airspace by flying to the heavens. To make what would become the vaunted SR-71 Blackbird, Lockheed knew it had to build a light plane, but one that was strong enough to hold extra fuel to give it expansive range. The only metal that would do the job was titanium. The only place to get titanium in the needed quantities was the Soviet Union.
The US worked through Third World countries and fake companies and finally was able to ship the ore to the US to build the SR-71. //
“The airplane is 92% titanium inside and out. Back when they were building the airplane the United States didn’t have the ore supplies – an ore called rutile ore. It’s a very sandy soil and it’s only found in very few parts of the world. The major supplier of the ore was the USSR. Working through Third World countries and bogus operations, they were able to get the rutile ore shipped to the United States to build the SR-71,” famous former SR-71 pilot Colonel Rich Graham said in an interesting article appeared on BBC.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20130701-tales-from-the-blackbird-cockpit
Communist in FDR's Administration
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 3, 2019
The Venona Secrets
I had read the book by Herbert Hoover, “Freedom Betrayed” the book, “Witness.” by Whittaker Chambers, the book by Diana West, “American Betrayal,” the book by M. Stanton Evans, “Blacklisted By History,” the book by M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Raomerstein, “Stalin’s Secret Agents,” and the book by John Koster, “Operation Snow” so I had a good idea how the Communist had infiltrated the Roosevelt administration. More than one of these books that I had read referred to the Venona cables.
Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel stated in the preface of this book that of particular interest to both of them was the Soviet attitude toward Jews. They wrote that they were not surprised that the NKVD, the Soviet foreign intelligence service, showed disdain for and made cynical use of the Jews willing to work for them. What surprised them was the Venona code name for Jews- “Rats.” They devote chapter 10 to this subject of Jews serving the Communist.
The authors made it clear that Moscow’s agents in the United States helped prevent an earlier Nazi surrender to the Anglo-Americans; the prospect of which haunted the USSR throughout the war. How Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White played an important role in the Soviet endeavor. White was what intelligence professionals call an “agent of influence.”
He not only spied for the Soviet Union throughout the war but also sought to shape critical U.S. economic policies in obedience to the orders of his Moscow masters. As a spy, he was a rival in perfidy to Alger Hiss and to the trio of British traitors, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Donald Maclean. The authors of this book go on to explain how “Operation Snow,” was executed by White and Soviet agents.
One of White’s greatest contributions to the Soviet effort was his role in the Morgenthau Plan for postwar Germany. The Morgenthau Plan was to convert Germany into a pasture. This book explains how it was conceived and what effect it had on Germany, Jews and our military forces.
White’s political star within the Roosevelt administration was never higher than in 1944. White was the chief American delegate at the historic conference in Britton Woods, New Hampshire, that plotted the postwar financial rules by which the Allies intended to restore their battered economies. Read this book to see how that turned out!
On March 31, 1945 Secretary of State Edward Stettinius wrote to White, “
On behalf of President Roosevelt and the members of the American delegation, it is my privilege to extend to you an invitation to become an official advisor to the delegation of the United states to the United Nations Conference on International Organization….” Less than a week later, a Moscow Venona message ordered Alhmerov to make arrangements with Silvermaster (Robert) about maintaining contact with White, then called (Richard), and another member of the Silvermaster ring, William Ludwig Ullman (Pilot) in San Francisco (Babylon).
During White’s attendance at the San Francisco conference, he was handled by NKVD officer Vladimir Pravdin (Sergej), who served in New York but attended the conference as a Soviet news agency TASS, reporter. White gave the Soviets information of the American delegation’s internal discussions. White also reported that “Truman and Stettinius want to achieve the success of the conference at any price.”
Alger Hiss, as agent of the GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence), was the acting secretary general at the founding conference of the UN. This provided the Soviets with the advanced notice on how the Americans would handle questions during the deliberations.
President Harry Truman had appointed the Treasury official as executive director of the International Monetary Fund. J. Edgar Hoover wrote to Brigadier General Harry Vaughan, President Truman’s military aid, asking him to give the enclosed background on White to the president. Hoover described White as a valuable adjunct to an underground Soviet espionage organization operating in Washington D.C., also the Canadian government sources had expressed their concern to the FBI about the appointment of White. The Canadians knew of White through the Soviet military intelligence defector Igor Gouzenko. Harry Truman did nothing with these reports and White was appointed.
Herbert and Eric go into great details of how the Soviet agents made an Apparat (was a full-time, professional functionary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union or the Soviet government apparat (аппарат, apparatus), someone who held any position of ...)
Chapter 4 is a chapter that explains Whittaker Chamber’s Spy Ring, I think Chambers does a much better job if this in his book “Witness.”
Chapter 5 details the Elizabeth Bentley Spy Ring, also the Silvermaster Ring, The Perlo Ring, and talks some about how Eleanor Roosevelt was targeted by the Soviets agents. The authors seem, to me, to be letting the Roosevelts off the hook, to their way of thinking, it is only because the Roosevelts are so naïve, that these spies were all over the White House. Why would Eleanor give the order to shut down the act of deciphering the Venona cables??? I’m glad her orders were not carried out.
Chapter 6 and 7 lays out the details of the Atomic Espionage. Here I found what I was looking for when I ordered this book. I had read much about Harry Hopkins in Diana West’s book American Betrayal and wanted more sources concerning him as a spy. Since he, to me, was so important because of how close he was to the Roosevelts. Harry had lived in the White House, slept in the Lincoln bedroom for three years and six months. Harry had dined with the Roosevelt every night. In this chapter on page 212 I read, In the 1960s, Oleg Gordievssky, a KGB officer, attended a lecture by the veteran Chekist Iskhak Akhmerov, who, had been the” illegal” Rezident in the United States during the war. Akhmerov mentioned his contact with Alger Hiss, but “the man he described as the most important of all Soviet wartime agents in the United States” was Harry Hopkins. Direct evidence in Venona confirms Akhmerov’s statement of his connection with Hopkins. This explains why Hopkins was adamant about shipping uranium to the Soviet Union despite the objections of the military authorities. Another example was Hopkins promotion of his friends including Colonel Philip R. Faymonville, who had been military attaché in Moscow from 1933 to 1938. Faymonville’s colleagues considered him to be extremely pro-soviet, calling him the “Red-Colonel.” When Hopkins in 1941 suggested sending him back to Moscow to expedite Lend-Lease, army intelligence objected. Hopkins said only, “You might as well get his papers ready, because he’s going.” Hopkins arranged for Faymonville to be promoted to brigadier general and later to general. Long story short, Faymonville was set-up, he met a young man that became his lover but was also a Soviet NKVD agent.
Later we learn about “Kvant” a mercenary spy, and Arthur Adams a Veteran Spy, Klaus Fuchs, a spy from Germany, The Rosenberg Case, other members of the Rosenberg Ring, Sarant and Barr Flee.
Chapter 8 Atomic Espionage in California at the University of Berkeley, how the Soviets used Trade Unions, The J. Robert Oppenheimer Case,
Chapter 9 How the Soviets targeted the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), VENONA reveals how easy the NKVD penetrated OSS, The French Connection.
Chapter 10- see above
Chapter 11 The Jack Soble/Robert Soblen Ring, Zarubin’s Stern Gang
Chapter 12- Polecats (Trotskyites) and Rats, (Jews), Stalin: Jews and Negroes Are Not Americans, Targeting Jewish Organizations, Duping Albert Einstein, The Murder of Erlich and Alter, Target: Jewish Telegraphic Agency, The International Workers Order and Espionage,
Chapter 13 Target: Journalists, The recruitment of I.F. Stone, Target: Lippmann, Mission in Moscow,
Chapter 14
The new documentation available since 1991 has been broadly, in two categories-(1) the archives of the Communist International, which were kept in Moscow, and the files of other Communist parties in Eastern and Central Europe; and (2) the Venona papers, which were kept in Forte Meade, Maryland. But finally made public, the material from east and west combined shows that the U.S. Communist Party was extensively and fruitfully in Moscow’s espionage infrastructure in America. The Party’s personalities, including General Secretary Earl Browder, were active participants in recruiting and vetting Party members on behalf of Soviet intelligence. Indeed, most of the wartime Soviet agents in the United States were members of the communist Party. Through the Party, the USSR was able to draw prospective agents from a pool of ideologues loyal to Moscow, a circumstance unique in history. This reality, which was clear to U.S. government investigators and many others for decades but which was- and is- disputed by liberal historians, is now a known fact.
Fact: There existed in important agencies of the U.S. government networks of American spies under the control of Soviet military intelligence and NKVD officers. These included individuals whose disloyalty has been acknowledged for years by almost all serious students of the subject, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and the Rosenbergs through the years have had a shrinking pool of defenders. Others, until the Venona documents were aired, were considered heroes of American liberalism.
Fact: Venona has shown conclusively that the highest-level American government officials working for Soviet intelligence was Harry Hopkins, the close friend and advisor of President Roosevelt. His clandestine contact with “illegal” Soviet intelligence officer Iskhak Akhmerov,
To whom he provided secret government information, alone makes the case against Hopkins. Only a Soviet agent would be permitted to know that an “illegal” intelligence officer such as Akhmerov was connected with the Soviet Union.
Fact: Atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer performed work on behalf of the Soviet Union. Although it has long been known that several of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project believed the world would be safer if the secrets of the atomic energy were shared with the Soviet Union, it had been considered bad manners even to suggest that the sensitive Oppenheimer could possibly be so crude as to be a conscious collaborator with the Soviet secret police. But he was.
Fact: The Left (Liberals) liked to use one of the right wing’s favorite complaints as evidence of its inanity-its belief that American journalists, including some of the best known, had been deliberately enlisted in the Soviet cause. The Venona documents leave no room for doubts that this was exactly the case, in particular regarding the loyalty of I.F. Stone to the Soviet Union and, in his case, to his book account.
Fact: The Communist movement displayed systematic and consistent anti-Semitism.
https://www.amazon.com/Venona-Secrets-Exposing-Espionage-Americas/dp/0895262754/
SAINT-LAURENT-DE-LA-PLAINE, France — The wooden structure supporting the roof of Notre Dame Cathedral was so vast, it was known as "the forest." It burned like a forest too. After the April 2019 fire that badly damaged the Paris landmark, nothing was left of the intricate maze of medieval beams but charred black timbers that pierced the nave and transept as they fell to the cathedral floor, leaving a gaping, smoking hole.
Now that charpente, as the framework supporting the roof is called, is being rebuilt as part of the effort to restore and reopen one of the world's most famous churches by the end of 2024.
At Ateliers Perrault, a 250-year-old carpentry company in France's Loire Valley — one of the two chosen to restore the roof — you don't hear the whirring of electric saws. It's the chopping of axes that resounds as craftsmen transform oak trees into long, rectangular beams by hand.
One of the big decisions IBM made in creating the original IBM PC was choosing to use the Intel 8088 processor as its central processing unit (CPU). This turned out to be hugely influential in establishing the Intel architecture—often called the x86 architecture—as the standard for the vast majority of the personal computer industry. But there are many stories around how the decision was made.
Up to that point, pretty much all the popular personal computers had run 8-bit processors. This included the Intel 8080 that was in the MITS Altair 8800 (the machine that led to Bill Gates and Paul Allen creating the first PC BASIC and then to the founding of Microsoft); the Zilog Z80, a chip that offered compatibility with the 8080 along with a variety of improvements and was used in the Osborne 1, Kaypro II and many other CP/M-based machines; and the MOS Technology 6502, which was used in the Apple II and the Commodore PET.
Intel followed its 8080 with the 8-bit 8085 and introduced the 16-bit 8086 in 1978. That was followed by the 8088, which had the same 16-bit internal architecture but was connected to an 8-bit data bus, in 1979. Meanwhile, some other more advanced chips were coming to market, such as the Motorola 68000 with 32-bit instructions, which was introduced in 1979 and would later be the processor in Apple's Lisa and Macintosh, Commodore Amiga, and a number of UNIX-based workstations. Both Gates and Allen say Microsoft talked IBM out of using an 8-bit processor and moving instead to the 16-bit 8088. //
Allen and Gates certainly believe that Microsoft led IBM to make that decision, but the IBM team tells a somewhat different story.
Dave Bradley, who wrote the BIOS (basic input output system) for the IBM PC, and many of the other engineers involved say IBM had already decided to use the x86 architecture while the project was still a task force preparing for management approval in August 1980.
In 1990, Bradley told Byte there were four reasons for choosing the 8088. First, it had to be a 16-bit chip that overcame the 64K memory limit of the 8-bit processors. Second, the processor and its peripheral chips had to be immediately available in quantity. Third, it had to be technology IBM was familiar with. Fourth, it had to have available languages and operating systems.
That all makes sense in leading to the decision for the 8086 or 8088. Newer chips like the Motorola 68000 didn't yet have the peripheral chips ready in the summer of 1980. And IBM was very familiar with the Intel family; indeed, Bradley had just finished creating control software for the IBM DataMaster, which was based on the 8-bit 8085. Bradley said IBM chose the 8088 with the 8-bit bus because it saved money on RAM, ROM, and logic chips.
Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM, by Paul Carroll, suggests the PC team picked the 8-bit version because using a full 16-bit processor might have caused IBM's Management Committee to cancel the project for fear of hurting sales of its more powerful products. Bill Syndes, who headed hardware engineering for the project, has said similar things in a few interviews.
Raymond Ibrahim’s book, ‘Defenders of the West,’ makes the case that the heroic actions of a few great crusaders saved the West from Muslim conquest. //
Fewer moments in history are as misunderstood and revised as the Crusades. This series of violent clashes between Christian and Muslim cultures spanning three continents and nearly a millennium has been characterized as a futile war of aggression. In the telling of most modern historians, belligerent, greedy, and racist Christians in Western Europe were periodically guided by a bloodthirsty theocrat in Rome to channel their savage energies toward embattling a rival faith in the delusional belief that this would guarantee their admittance into Heaven, if not an earthly kingdom to rule over. What resulted was hardly more than pointless slaughter on both sides.
Nearly all of this is false. The Crusades were wars of defense, with Christians attempting to drive out foreign Muslim invaders in lands that were formerly Christian. Far from being unenlightened savages, the Crusaders were a highly organized force that pushed the boundaries of what was possible in warfare, government, and religious practice. The great personal sacrifice of the Crusaders, along with moral arguments against the use of violence, disprove the idea that they did this for personal gain.
By contrast, the Muslim invaders greatly profited from their conquests.
Instead, Beschloss posting these pictures shows just how unnatural the political atmosphere is now and how a lot of the media is operating like scribes for Biden and the Democratic Party. Instead of looking at a variety of the real issues that plague the president, this tumble is barely being mentioned today and/or is being downplayed. Then it will be dismissed, just like Biden’s other falls and gaffes. Instead of being the representatives of the people, liberal journalists have become shills for the powerful. //
Dom
4 hours ago
Both Carter and Ford are one term presidents. As a historían, he should see the parallels. //
bk
3 hours ago edited
Biden's surviving all these catastrophes is obviously much more impressive than 70yo Ronald Reagan getting SHOT and then serving out two full terms. /s //
cgh62
4 hours ago
Beschloss is a terrible historian. I read one of his books, and the garbage he was pushing was easily refuted by multiple sources in previous works. The guys an idiot. Don't ever waste your money buying one of his books, or waste your time listening to anything he has to say.
Cox has found that Stonehenge once acted as an echo chamber, leading some to believe it was a ritual site for those belonging to an elite inner circle. //
The problem with acoustic archaeology is that sound disappears, so we can't ever be certain about what was done there.
Stretching 2,700km from Laverton in Western Australia to Winton in far-off Queensland, the Outback Way is a great diagonal "shortcut" across the nation that saves weeks of travel.
Known as "torfbæir", these ingeniously designed homes helped settle one of Europe's least-hospitable environments.
It's mentioned in the Bible, it been used by a succession of empires and it links some of Jordan's most important historical sites.
"Welcome to Jordan!" a group of kids shouted excitedly, as I stepped out of the car to admire the sun setting over the vast sandstone canyon of Wadi Mujib.
While I stood on the cliff's edge, awestruck by the mountain ranges stretching to the Dead Sea, a black-and-white hooded wheatear swooped down near me. I wondered how something so delicate could survive in such desolate ravines, fluttering across the arid mountains and building nests in rock crevices.
From my perch, I could see a narrow, serpentine road winding down the ridges and gorges. This route, known as the King's Highway, or Darb ar-Raseef ("paved road", in Arabic), is believed to be one of the world's oldest continuously used roads. For millennia, merchants, pilgrims, warriors and kings travelled north to south through Jordan's central highlands, and this thoroughfare served as a vital artery connecting ancient kingdoms and empires.
Stretching 185km across the mountains to the Iraq-Iran border, it's a stunning feat of engineering that nearly didn't happen.
Stretching 185km from Erbil across the imposing Zagros Mountains to the town of Haji Omeran on the Iraqi Kurdistan-Iran border, the road is not only considered one of western Asia's most spectacular routes, but one of its most audacious feats of engineering.
Thatched buildings are deeply connected to Japan's history and culture, yet few survive. However, a cluster of villages near Kyoto are keeping this ancient tradition alive.
Along a single road cutting across the heart of Iraq, you can see where people first learned to write, use maths and invent the wheel.
"This is not a scenic drive," said James Willcox, of adventure travel specialist Untamed Borders. "But what's incredible about Route 1 is where it takes you: to the birthplace of some of the world's earliest civilisations, the home of many of humankind's greatest innovations."
Willcox, who was charged with logistics and security for my journey, was briefing me before I embarked on a 530km, two-day road trip from Basra to Baghdad. My trip would be using Iraq's first and longest freeway, the 1,200km-long Route 1, as a conduit to explore the heart of ancient Mesopotamia. Though the region has experienced decades of recent conflict, it was also once home to a series of illustrious historical empires (the Babylonians, Assyrians and Sumerians to name a few), and Willcox reassured me that the journey would be unforgettable so long as I followed some simple rules: "Keep a low profile, dress conservatively and don't photograph any of the armed checkpoints," he said.