Daily Shaarli
August 31, 2021
- Build your storage system by adding four 2.5in SAS or SATA drives into one 5.25in bay
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- Easy, error free insertion of tray with vertically or horizontally mounted backplane
If you listen to electric vehicle naysayers, switching to EVs is pointless because even if the cars are vastly more efficient than ones that use internal combustion engines—and they are—that doesn't take into account the amount of carbon required to build and then scrap them. Well, rest easy because it's not true. Today in the US market, a medium-sized battery EV already has 60–68 percent lower lifetime carbon emissions than a comparable car with an internal combustion engine. And the gap is only going to increase as we use more renewable electricity.
That finding comes from a white paper (.pdf) published by Georg Bieker at the International Council on Clean Transportation. The comprehensive study compares the lifetime carbon emissions, both today and in 2030, of midsized vehicles in Europe, the US, China, and India, across a wide range of powertrain types, including gasoline, diesel, hybrid EVs (HEVs), plug-in hybrid EVs (PHEVs), battery EVs (BEVs), and fuel cell EVs (FCEVs). (The ICCT is the same organization that funded the research into VW Group's diesel emissions.)
"You can now take the controls of a historic NASA spacecraft — literally.
A team of Hollywood prop and visual artists are offering replicas of the Apollo command module control panel. The museum-quality reproduction features every switch, knob and indicator that was used on board the first three missions to land astronauts on the moon and to bring the Apollo 13 crew safely back to Earth.
"It is here where the impossible becomes possible," team leader Mark Lasoff, an Academy Award-winning artist whose credits include the 1995 feature film "Apollo 13," wrote about the control panel. "It is here where humans and machines interface. It is here where every vital operation, including navigation, propulsion, communication and life support is calculated, calibrated and controlled intricately."
"It is both an engineering feat and a work of art," Lasoff wrote of the flight deck." //
Measuring an expansive 82 inches wide, 33 inches tall, and 7 inches deep (208 by 84 by 18 cm), the replica control panel was designed using the original blueprints for the NASA spacecraft. Lasoff and his team also used 3D scans of the Apollo 11 command module produced by the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum to verify their details.
The Kickstarter campaign is offering the full-scale metal replica for $3,900.
Nuclear energy is far safer than its reputation implies. It's also clean and reliable -- yet power plants are being phased out around the world. //
A quick thought experiment. What would the climate change debate look like if all humanity had was fossil fuels and renewables -- and then today an engineering visionary revealed a new invention: nuclear energy. That's the hypothetical posed to me by Dietmar Detering, a German entrepreneur living in New York.
"I'm sure we'd develop the hell out of it," he said, before sighing. "We're looking at a different world right now." //
Detering thinks nuclear energy could be the key to solving the climate crisis. A former member of Germany's Green Party, Detering now spends his spare time as co-chair of the Nuclear New York advocacy group. He's part of a wave of environmentalists campaigning for more nuclear energy.
Though the word evokes images of landscapes pulverized by atomic calamity -- Hiroshima, Chernobyl, Fukushima -- proponents like Detering and his colleague Eric Dawson point out that nuclear power produces huge amounts of electricity while emitting next to no carbon.
This separates it from fossil fuels, which are consistent but dirty, and renewables, which are clean but weather dependent. Contrary to their apocalyptic reputation, nuclear power plants are relatively safe. Coal power is estimated to kill around 350 times as many people per terawatt-hour of energy produced, mostly from air pollution, compared to nuclear power. //
But many scientists and experts believe nuclear power is necessary to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. "Anyone seriously interested in preventing dangerous levels of global warming should be advocating nuclear power," wrote James Hansen, a former NASA scientist credited with raising awareness of global warming in the late '80s, in a 2019 column. //
In the public imagination, nuclear power presages disaster. But the numbers tell a different story. Estimates of deaths from nuclear incidents range from less than 10,000 to around 1 million. As you can infer, it's a highly contested number -- but in either case dwarfed by the death toll from fossil fuel pollution. Around 8.7 million premature deaths were caused by fossil fuel pollution in 2018 alone, according to a February Harvard study.
The best stories are the ones which are told the best, with all those wonderful literary keystones fitted neatly together. They are the ones we learn of in creative writing: can we see ourselves in the characters, are they flawed, do they make the right choice or the easy one, can we relate to their difficulties?
Tolkien and his characters reflect, whether he would like them to or not, how the times during which one lives tend to vacuum them up, obscuring thoughts of the future or of the past. COVID-19 has been compared to many great crises, sometimes fairly, sometimes comedically, but we can learn from the great writer and his characters that the correct way out of a crisis is to never believe the current disaster is somehow unique in its dreadfulness. //
Tolkien became a man in perhaps the worst single moment in history to do so, around 1914, at the dawning of World War I.
“In those days chaps joined up, or were scorned publicly,” he wrote in a letter to his son Christopher later in life. “It was a nasty cleft to be in for a young man with too much imagination and little physical courage.”
He was a junior officer at the Battle of the Somme, one of the most tragic events in human history, notable for the sheer empty-headedness of it all. Catching trench fever, he was shipped back to England, after which nearly every young man in his battalion was killed. Talk about a Hobbit’s luck.
WASHINGTON, Aug 30 (Reuters) - Kabul airport is without air traffic control services now that the U.S. military has withdrawn from Afghanistan, and U.S. civil aircraft are barred from operating over the country unless given prior authorization, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said on Monday.
The FAA said in a statement that "due to both the lack of air traffic services and a functional civil aviation authority in Afghanistan, as well as ongoing security concerns, U.S. civil operators, pilots, and U.S.-registered civil aircraft are prohibited from operating at any altitude over much of Afghanistan." //
The FAA said U.S. civil operators "may continue to use one high-altitude jet route near the far eastern border for overflights. Any U.S. civil aircraft operator that wants to fly into/out of or over Afghanistan must receive prior authorization from the FAA."
Hurricane Ida will go down as one of the most powerful storms to make landfall in the United States. On the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the city of New Orleans was struck by this storm and left broken yet again. //
Bobby Jindal came in and, to his credit, it appears he did fight to get the levee systems of New Orleans in working order, and some improvements were made. But the city itself had made very few changes to allow for the residents to be ready to move in the event of another disaster. Even after sixteen years, it appears the only thing that changed was the levee systems. Everything else failed again.
But the biggest failure of all seems to be a lack of an evacuation plan. //
Gabe Hoffman
@GabeHoff
Contraflow = both sides of major highways in same direction, for storm evacuations
Louisiana 2021:
didn't implement contraflow before Hurricane Ida, many people are stuck in traffic jams trying to evacuate RN
20 years ago in Florida:
@JebBush pioneered a contraflow system
5:59 PM · Aug 28, 2021
If you work with storage applications or storage hardware there’s a good chance you’ve heard of ZFS. ZFS is essentially a software implementation of RAID but in my experience the most reliable it’s software RAID I’ve worked with.
Traidtion RAID instead of ZFS
Comparison to standard RAID
Over the years I’ve worked with several implementations of hardware RAID and for the most part they are pretty equal. However, most hardware RAID implementations I’ve seen — mine included — aren’t really done well. Before I move on to ZFS RAID I’m going to cover the basic problems I’ve come across with Hardware RAID setups which contributed to my switch to ZFS. In this list below RAID = “Hardware RAID”
- RAID controllers are typically more expensive than HBAs (Host Bus Adapters)
- Many RAID users do not properly set their cache settings on top of the fact that most cards do not come with a BBU. Lots of admins get frustrated with throughput and force write-back without a BBU
- RAID controllers rarely keep up with drive capacity
- Sometimes the implementation is proprietary which can make your setup less scalable (limited RAID sets, inability to mix/max nested raid or difficult to expand existing sets)
- Most user interfaces I have worked with for hardware RAID were poor; i.e. option ROMs on the card that can’t see full disk names or OS specific utilities that are buggy or available to select OS installs only
- I’ve yet to see a RAID card that allows you to perform a scan for errors like the ZFS scrub. I’m not saying they don’t exist, just haven’t see them
Full-Scale Model of Apollo 11 12 13 14 Command Module Control Panel (CMCP)
All or nothing. This project will only be funded if it reaches its goal by Tue, September 21 2021 2:03 PM EDT.
Measuring a massive 82" wide, 33" tall, and 7" deep, all representing that same vision of teamwork, peaceful exploration, engineering accomplishment, and pioneering spirit.
Chris Stigall
@ChrisStigall
I’d love to tell you this is a @GOP ad…I’d love to tell you that.
https://youtu.be/LamRwl5Z2qk //
It juxtaposes all the troubling things we’re presently seeing in radical leftism – the wokeness, the defund the police movement, the riots, the moral decay and the effort to attack America, complemented by the warning words of Ronald Reagan. The only thing more powerful than that threat, so succinctly put forth, is the rest of the video, with Reagan declaring the freedom and the greatness of America. //
“I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result in an erosion of the American spirit,” Reagan says. “If we forget what we did, we wouldn’t know who we are. We’ve got to do a better job of getting across, that America is freedom. Freedom is special and rare. Freedom of speech. Freedom of religion. Freedom of enterprise. As long as we remember our first principles, and believe in ourselves, the future will always be ours. Ours was the first revolution in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government, and with these three little words: We The People. We the people are free. Once you begin a great movement, there’s no telling where it will end.”
Yes, it’s an ad for wine, from conservative winemakers, We The People, and great job, guys. Good name too. The GOP guys who are behind ads should see whoever did this and solicit those folks to do their ads. It puts everything into such sharp focus and grabs the heart. It’s so riveting. And it so clearly notes that we have to do a better job at teaching the young coming up what America is and that we were behind on that teaching even when Reagan said those words. The words of Reagan are from his Farewell Address, as he left the presidency in 1989, and remind us of how great he was, how well he could put forth the Republican message.
David Harsanyi
@davidharsanyi
This is like celebrating the Titanic's sinking as the most successful lifeboat rescue mission in history.
Caitlin Doornbos
@CaitlinDoornbos
Replying to @CaitlinDoornbos
Kirby just called the evacuation "the largest airlift that the U.S. military has conducted [and] got 122,000 people to safety.
"The numbers speak for themselves -- 122,000+, that is significant, and a lot of lives were saved and a lot of lives are now in a better place." //
Tea Party Patriots
@TPPatriots
"Instead of keeping his promise to the American people, President Biden kept his promise to the Taliban..." - @itsSpencerBrown //
Simply put, Joe Biden personifies the worst of partisan politics; the belief that self-aggrandizement and “winning” — at any cost — always justify any means to a non-negotiable end. Integrity, honor, and, in this case, “a few” American lives, be damned. Or, put more tactfully, “are expendable.” //
What I am talking about is Biden’s ill-conceived withdrawal, based solely on political expediency — haphazardly executed and prosecuted in a manner opposed by multiple high-ranking military leaders and former leaders, as well others. (See: “Bagram,” “American citizens first, military last.”) //
Baseball1969
an hour ago
Just in- 51 military service dogs were left behind..they were at the airport but after 3 days the DOD decided to release them on the tarmac …
NEW ORLEANS — The entire New Orleans area south of Lake Pontchartrain is expected to be without power for weeks because all eight of Entergy’s transmission lines delivering electricity from the outside world failed simultaneously.
Hurricane Ida’s intense winds turned one of the main transmission towers into a heap of twisted and rusted metal along River Road at the edge of Bridge City. //
It was a staggering sight for a tower that rose 400 feet above the Avondale Shipyard and supported power lines across a 3,800 foot span to a tower across the Mississippi River in Harahan. On Monday, those same power lines could be seen in drone footage overhead, dunked into the muddy river.
That’s only one of the entry points that failed, leaving Entergy customers on what the utility officially calls an “island.” Entergy says it’s trying to assess and investigate what it acknowledged was a “catastrophic transmission failure” and scrambling to figure out how to restore power.
Entergy Louisiana CEO Phillip May said that assessment period will take at least four days, after which more than 20,000 restoration workers will pursue at least two tracks to get the lights back on:
Getting at least one of the failed transmission lines back up and running, or by generating power from within the island itself, using the power station at Nine Mile Point, or by firing up the new power plant at Michoud, in New Orleans East. //
The second option, creating a self-generated power source from within the “island,” is not ideal, but will be pursued at the same time. First, to use the 230 megawatts of power that can be generated at the New Orleans Power Station, Entergy still needs to restore enough transmission lines to deliver electricity to customers. //
In addition to the New Orleans Power Station, Entergy hopes to generate another 400 megawatts at the Nine Mile power station and use large generators to push the total electricity on the “island” above 600 megawatts. That would be enough to provide critical power to services and infrastructure but not enough for all customers to be restored, Moreno said.
Curtis Houck
@CurtisHouck
.@RichardEngel: "This was a humbling day for the United States, a day of humility for a world superpower. Afghanistan has been called the graveyard of empires...The [U.S.] fought [there] for 20 yrs and is now...withdrawing...in defeat. This is a difficult moment for the military"
.@RichardEngel: "The world's greatest military couldn't hold on and ultimately, handed the country back to the same extremists that they had toppled just a few weeks after 9/11...The next Osama bin Laden might be watching what is happening right now[.]" //
“But if you’d step back and look at what is going on, this is the United States, after 20 years. This war used to be called Operation Enduring Freedom, and it’s turned out not to be enduring and they’re not leaving a society that is free,” he said in the below clip. “It is only free according to what the Taliban says will be free, the Taliban promises that it will be free.”
“You could also look at this as a tremendously humiliating – moment of American humiliation leaving, forced to leave on the Taliban’s clock and with the Taliban’s good graces,” Engel continued. “So tactically, it makes sense, but I’m not sure how history – I think history will judge this moment as a very dark period for the United States.” //
As Engel noted in his reports, we toppled the Taliban in a matter of weeks after 9/11. And now, after 20 years, in a matter of weeks, the Taliban has control again and it’s because of the way the exit was done.
ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit!
It has several 'Modes', each one for performing a different task:
- Read - Read a disc to an image file
- Build - Create an image file from files on your computer or network - or you can write the files directly to a disc
- Write - Write an image file to a disc
- Verify - Check a disc is 100% readable. Optionally, you can also have ImgBurn compare it against a given image file to ensure the actual data is correct
- Discovery - Put your drive / media to the test! Used in combination with DVDInfoPro, you can check the quality of the burns your drive is producing
ImgBurn supports a wide range of image file formats - including BIN, CCD, CDI, CUE, DI, DVD, GI, IMG, ISO, MDS, NRG and PDI.
It can burn Audio CD's from any file type supported via DirectShow / ACM - including AAC, APE, FLAC, M4A, MP3, MP4, MPC, OGG, PCM, WAV, WMA and WV.
You can use it to build DVD Video discs (from a VIDEO_TS folder), HD DVD Video discs (from a HVDVD_TS folder) and Blu-ray Video discs (from a BDAV / BDMV folder) with ease.
It supports Unicode folder/file names, so you shouldn't run in to any problems if you're using an international character set.
ImgBurn supports all the Microsoft Windows OS's - Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT4, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 2008, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10 (including all the 64-bit versions). If you use Wine, it should also run on Linux and other x86-based Unixes.
It's a very flexible application with several advanced features that are often lacking in other tools, especially when it comes to burning DVD Video discs. It supports all the latest drives without the need for updates (including booktype / bitsetting / advanced settings on many of the major ones - i.e. BenQ, LiteOn, LG, NEC, Optiarc, Pioneer, Plextor, Samsung, Sony).
There is an image queue system for when you're burning several images (which you can automatically share between multiple drives if you have more than one) and an easy-to-use layer break selection screen for double layer DVD Video jobs. The Automatic Write Speed feature allows you store your favourite burn speed settings on a per 'Media ID' basis, right down to a drive by drive level. Data captured during the burn (write speed, buffer levels etc) can be displayed / analysed using DVDInfoPro.
Whilst ImgBurn is designed to work perfectly straight out of the box, advanced users will appreciate just how configurable it is.
Oh and let's not forget the best thing about it.... it's 100% FREE ;-)
It was a huge mistake, one of the biggest mistakes in our nation’s military history. But it was Joe Biden, who made that decision. I know for a fact that the military advised him not to leave Bagram.
He said we’re going to downsize to 600 Marines. And the leadership told him we can’t hold Bagram with 600 Marines. He said, I don’t care go to 600. He arbitrarily picked a number out of the sky. And they couldn’t hold that base with 600. So they collapsed to Kabul.
This is Joe Biden, and his incompetence that made that decision. And that decision is what cost those lives today. The perimeter around that base is a street wide. That’s it. But out of Bagram, you had kilometers of range that you can see the enemy coming. But not when it’s just a street in the middle of an urban area.
It’s a horrible decision. It’s 100 percent Joe Biden’s and that’s not the first lie this guy has told or I should say he’s totally disconnected from the truth, many, many other lies, and it just he needs to step down. He needs to resign or the cabinet needs to do something. //
WALTZ: –on that Bagram point because we were just briefed by the military yesterday on the Armed Services Committee, that when we went back in to evacuate the embassy, they were once again presented Joe Biden with the option of taking Bagram. And he once again didn’t choose to do so.
So, on the one hand, he didn’t listen about shutting it down too fast. By the way, 5000, hardened ISIS, Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners are now on the loose, and then he didn’t listen when they had to go back in to evacuate our Embassy after the after the collapse of Kabul.
And now he’s tying the hands of our special forces who are chomping at the bit to go out into the city and outside of the city to get our Americans that are stranded. He won’t let them do that either. Their hands are being tied. So this is just incompetence. And it’s just outrageous. //
What they are saying they were told by Defense in briefings is that the military wanted to use Bagram. That would entail deploying additional troops from the US to Afghanistan to secure a much larger perimeter. Biden vetoed the recommendation and imposed an artificial limit of 600 troops. Six hundred may sound like a lot, but 600 men can barely defend themselves, much less secure checkpoints and process refugees when you are deep inside of enemy territory.
The American people are not to blame for this mess. Joe Biden and those who supported him are. Never Trumpers don’t get to run from that now that things have collapsed.
America's next trip to the moon may suddenly be delayed bit thanks to...PDFs?
A U.S. federal judge has granted the Department of Justice a week-long extension in its lawsuit with Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin. The reason? Large PDF files. //
According to Blue Origin, there are "fundamental issues" with NASA's decision. The company also claims that the agency was supposed to provide multiple awards.
However, the process has been delayed due to PDF problems. PDFs are a proprietary file format created by Adobe used primarily for documents. Attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice say there have been a myriad of issues related to the PDF format.
According to the DOJ, there is more than 7 GB of data related to the case. However, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims' online system allows for only files of up to 50 MB in size to be uploaded. //
Instead of using the online file system, the U.S. government will transfer the documents for the case to DVDs.
Both Blue Origin and SpaceX agreed to the extension. NASA's contact with SpaceX is currently on pause until Nov. 1 due to the lawsuit. This latest development would seemingly extend that for another week.
Space exploration is currently on hold thanks to a lawsuit and a slew of pesky PDF files.
It’s been nearly five decades since the Lockheed L-1011 TriStar entered service. Operators such as TWA praised the aircraft as one of the safest in the world, while powerhouses such as Delta Air Lines were also massive fans. Those flying on the plane following its introduction in the 1970s would have noticed that there was a curved row of lavatories at the back of the widebody trijet. //
The Lockheed L-1011 came with numerous cabin innovations. For example, it had full-sized hideaway closets for jackets, glare-resistant windows, and even a below-deck galley. Inflight meals made their way up to the main cabin via a pair of elevators. //
Airline Secrets Exposed
on Friday
The Lockheed L1011 had 6 lavatories in the rear in a circular configuration wrapped around the rear bulkhead. They were just under the intake to number 2 engine. The noise was sometimes deafening and the sucking sound of the intake was a little off putting.
Schmitz said initially he wasn’t going to meet with Biden, but then said he thought he owed it to his son to share what he thought with Biden. “It didn’t go well,” he sighed. He said Biden spoke more about his own son than about Jared and “that didn’t sit well with me.”
Taylor Hoover was set to return home on September 15, retire and marry his fiancé. “It’s the absolute worst feeling in the world,” his father said. “Every one of them is a hero, there’s no doubt…They died with their brothers and their sisters right next to them, doing exactly what they all wanted to do, and that is defending this country.” In regard to Biden, Hoover said his family didn’t want him anywhere near them. Hoover said that Biden checked his watch on “every single one of them that came out of that airplane.” “They would release the salute,” he said and then he would look down at his watch, “on every last one.” “Seeing that, and the disrespect. Hearing from his, uh, former leaders. One of his master sergeants said exactly what you just said…that this was avoidable, that they left them over there, they had them over there and let them down.” Hoover said, “This can’t happen, ever again.”
As events unfold in Afghanistan with thousands of Americans and allies tragically needing rescue, 245 years ago this week, an American general successfully executed an extraordinary rescue–an “American Dunkirk”—that saved the Revolution. Washington’s army faced potential annihilation–all could have been lost. However, leadership, daring, and initiative transformed that critical moment into one of the greatest evacuations in history. //
The extraordinary story of how a small unit of men from Marblehead, Massachusetts transported Washington’s men and matériel across the East River under the cover of darkness is now told in the new bestselling book, The Indispensables: Marblehead’s Diverse Soldier-Mariners Who Shaped the Country, Formed the Navy, and Rowed Washington Across the Delaware. The book is a Band of Brothers-style treatment of this unique regiment, a largely unknown group of Americans who changed the course of history.