Excellent. Now all I needs is my own observatory. Oh, and the land in a location worthy of building that observatory. That's said only half jokingly. I already have my mount, a primary scope, a second scope for guiding, and a camera. So it is something a boy dreams about doing when he grows up.
You'd be surprised what you can see under light pollutes skies. Especially in narrowband. I built an observatory in a bortle 7 and I get plenty of good data. Link in profile if you wanna see my work
I can see Jupiter, Saturn, the Moon, etc. But even looking at Andromeda is difficult. Pleiades is also difficult. I'm minutes outside of downtown, so light pollution in my area is intense.
I think GP was mostly referring to astrophotography when it comes to light-polluted areas. I live in a bortle 9 area (downtown) and unless I bring out my 20" dobsonian I'm mostly visually limited to double stars, planets, bright clusters, and extremely bright emission nebulae such as M42. With modern LED broad-spectrum lighting, skyglow definitely becomes a major issue, especially for broadband targets like Andromeda.
However, I've been able to capture stunning images (and an APOD) even in broadband within my city using dedicated astro cameras and modern gradient processing techniques quite easily, so we're definitely living in the golden age for EAA if you'd consider that as an alternative.
Something I found funny during the entire saga, I'd have expected to see a fully built shed that was started/completed after the dome started but before it finished. You know, as the icing on the cake!
In my bortle 8 city, I have been able to get some decent images of the Eastern Veil Nebula with an Optolong L-Pro pollution filter, Zenithstar 73, and about ~2hrs total exposure (color)
Just for poking around, SharpCap has a live stacking mode which helps finding the darker stuff
Isn't it only immunity as long as Congress is controlled by the same party so that no impeachment/conviction? Otherwise, Congress technically still has that ability. That's also what Trump was screaming the whole time that Congress is the only way to hold POTUS accountable.
> That's also what Trump was screaming the whole time that Congress is the only way to hold POTUS accountable.
And this is just wrong - anyone can see that every branch must be held accountable by other branches. This supreme court has done more damage to America than most historical supreme courts.
SCOTUS didn't say that Congress couldn't impeach. As I understand it, SCOTUS said that POTUS couldn't be prosecuted as a civilian for things he did as POTUS. This puts an asterisk on the "no man above the law", as they are saying that if POTUS does something impeachable but Congress doesn't impeach/convict, then there's no other recourse for holding POTUS accountable. Trump is taking advantage of that for everything that it's worth.
Somebody really has it out for you killing your comments
I see what you're saying. As much as I dislike it, it makes sense if you agree with the Project 2025 view of the power of POTUS. Clearly the majority of SCOUTS does with that ruling. I don't agree with it as I don't think the founding fathers would have ever wanted POTUS to have that much protection, but I'm of no significance so what I do or don't agree with is just some guy on the internet yelling at clouds.
You say fail, but that's because you're looking at it from a "running a business" viewpoint. Instead, you have to look at "enrich personal wealth" viewpoint. It's possible to run a business into the ground while personally gaining financially. A failing business has some beneficial tax purposes. So people that think these failed businesses are a negative just need to look at them differently. They succeeded in their true purpose. The "running a business" was just the facade.
Yeah, the scam is to inflate the value of your properties, then claim a write-off when it fails. For "some reason" you can even use other people's money for the investments and claim the losses for yourself. Then you can use that as a deduction when you actually make money again. One scammer in particular pulled this trick for 10 years, rolling it forward and filing a $916 million loss with the IRS in 1995.
Feels like a "draw a circle. draw the rest of the owl" situation. How much metadata is stored in the video file? Are they storing a GPS update per frame, per second, once at the start of the file? I'm totally unfamiliar with the dashcam used, so I've just never seen the GPS data embedding as describe.
Tesla started recently embedding gps and other telemetry into their dash cam videos (wheel turn percent, accelerator percent, etc). It's stored as a separate data stream in the video file and was very easy to extract and parse
In theory machine vision could extract the coordinates overlayed in the frames of the video.
You're unlikely to get good data from all frames automatically due to the changing background but I'd have thought you could get enough good data to make it work.
Aw man, I'm kind of jealous of you. To be able to go back and see Peter Sellers movies for the first time again would be amazing. My dad absolutely loved him, and I can still hear him cackling at his movies growing up. As a kid, they weren't very funny, but as an adult I now get it.
I watched the Pink Pather movies with my dad growing up, and re-watched them with my son a year or two ago. Watching them with him was kinda like watching for the first time.
He was so funny. I need to watch some of his other films.
I've mentioned this before, but my first CoLo server was from a friend that built servers for a good sized hosting company back in the late 90s. He built it from spare parts but had no case for it. He hung the mother board against a dry erase board from the mounting holes with zip ties. He had a PSU sitting on his workbench with cables feeding up to the mobo. IIRC, the hard drive was suspended on the wall as well. In that vein, anything can be a "rack" if you squint at it hard enough and maybe tilt your head a bit.
I am afriad thhe GPUs chips will be often useless (to power hungry, running too hot and needing too expensive accessories) but it might be possible to harvest the memory chips and put them on useful GPU cards.
Win2K was my favorite as well. The transparency was tasteful. Everything worked and for the most part didn’t crash. Many (most?) games worked. It ran great on a PIII 600mhz. Everything good about NT4 was better and most of the consumer friendly stuff starting to take shape. The disc was even gorgeous. Peak MS design and engineering.
I love me some Windows 2000 but when I got to XP I was running it with a BeOS theme. My peak of windows ux may be around Windows 10 Beta 1 - combined 7/8/10 transparent and start menu and was super fast. That said beta 1 of Win11 was also super fast so that makes me wonder what they broke under the hood.
> There were OS improvements too, but I have forgot what …
Hold up, there is no need for this revisionist history.
At the very least, Windows 95 introduced the ability to run 32-bit apps pre-emptively that was otherwise only available on Windows NT. You continued to maintain the ability to run 16-but apps that wouldn’t run on Win NT.
You also gained support for long filenames, and to the chagrin of many, plug-and-play.
These were foundational and set the tone for the next 30 years of computing.
I don't remember if Plug-n-Play shipped with the original Windows 95 (it's certainly there in the final OSR), but that was a pretty big shift from the manual IRQ and port mapping days of DOS/Windows 3.1.
They were fake long file names though. At the actual dos layer they were 8.3. And the plug and play was terrrrible. I always turned it off. Ugh the plug and play modems/soundcards were trash.
They weren't fake long file names. They were actual long files names but of course the operating system that didn't support long files names didn't know what to do with the (very real) long file names. It only knew the 8.3 file name that was also set for compatibility.
Of course it sucked if you looked at or worked with DOS based apps. But it was one of those things that was always good about Microsoft Windows: Backwards compatibility.
They literally would build in (bug-) compatibility layers for specific games, where if they detected you were running a particular game, they'd not use the fixed or optimized code paths, but the old ones / emulate / patch things as the game expected them to be. And that was not because Windows was buggy and the games were good. It was the other way around. Games used trickery and internal knowledge that they shouldn't and if/when MS would block those paths or change internals, those games would stop working or crash.
You're not wrong, but PnP including the configuration basis for PCI which still sits at the config space layer of the latest and greatest PCIe. That's the piece I find so significant. I work with GPUs that mostly communicate over a proprietary C2C connection, but how does the OS find them? PCI enumeration.
IIRC we got long filenames with Win95, and a built-in network stack, no more Trumpet WinSock. And it did seem more stable, not nearly as good as NT/2000 but better than 3.1.
> IIRC we got long filenames with Win95, and a built-in network stack, no more Trumpet WinSock. And it did seem more stable, not nearly as good as NT/2000 but better than 3.1.
Kinda sorta but this misses context.
> we got long filenames
Consumers got long filenames. NT had been doing it for a couple of years. Win95 did it on FAT on a mass-market OS.
> a built-in network stack
No. Windows for Workgroups had offered that for several years. It talked NetBEUI, the Microsoft protocol, out of the box, and it also talked Novell IPX/SPX for talking to Netware, and DECnet, and HP-DLC...
But you hint at the important bit...
> no more Trumpet WinSock
Bingo. Win95 offered native 32-bit TCP/IP for the first time and it was over Ethernet.
WfWg had DOS-based 16-bit TCP/IP but only over Ethernet (or Token Ring!) It didn't have dialup networking -- at all. It couldn't talk TCP/IP over PPP, such as over a modem. WfWg 3.11 offered, only as an optional extra download, a 32-bit TCP/IP stack -- for network cards. And nobody had anything to download it over. ;-)
Internet Explorer 4 for Windows 3.x had an optional 16-bit dialup stack and optional 16-bit TCP/IP -- but that could not talk to a network card.
I know, it's prehistory, but in the late 1980s and early to mid 1990s, local-area networks were catching on like wildfire and by 1993 or so Microsoft noticed and made networking in Windows a standard feature.
What is overlooked today: it didn't use TCP/IP.
Nothing much did. Not even big iron or minicomputers like DEC VAX kit with VMS. TCP/IP was a Unix thing, and Unix cost $thousands just for the OS, plus $thousands more for the hardware. Even if you ran it on PCs, you needed $thousands worth of RAM. SCO Xenix was huge but for production it needed 2-4 MB of RAM, ideally 8+ MB, and in the DOS era, PCs came with 1 MB.
Oh, that is _hilarious._ Mac started out strong and has always kept ahead of Windows in many if not most ways that GIUs are done.
Hell, every now and then I’ll fire up my 2002 Power Mac (dual 1.25Ghz G4, MDD) and just bask in the beauty that is OS 9.2.2. While it was lacking good multitasking and multi-user accounts, it is still an exquisitely gorgeous UI.
I still use it for various tasks, although it’s close to impossible to do decent Internet work on it, owing to no available modern web browsers.
Train locomotives have used diesel powered generators that then powers electric motors. Would this be less efficient than battery powered EVs? Or better asked, what would be the most efficient use of gasoline?
> Would this be less efficient than battery powered EVs?
Measured in terms of mass * distance, trains with steel wheels will beat anything with rubber pneumatic tires.
Part of the magic of hybrid trains is that you can have multiple generation units that can be turned on or off as needed.
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Efficiency is just one consideration for a power plant.
Historically, reliability has been more important than efficiency, especially for industrial applications like locomotives. In other words, locomotives are probably not as efficient as they could be. For instance, you could use a lower viscosity engine oil for lubrication, but that would reduce reliability as engines fail due to friction.
In the auto industry these are usually called a series hybrid and there have been a handful. The Chevy Volt (though it had the ability to directly connect the engine to the wheels at highway speeds), and the BMW i3 and i8, the Fisker Karma/Karma Revero. The new Ram Ramcharger truck and the second gen Ford Lightning will also be series hybrids.
It's a really good drivetrain that was unfortunately made untenable for a long time by a combination of regulation and market forces.
When it comes to the environment the most efficient use is to leave it in the ground.
Hybrids work for trains because they are so large and don't need big swings of acceleration or to climb steep grades. They can run the diesel generators at maximum efficiency.
Battery power would be better, because you can build even larger power plants running at higher heats and not have to haul them with you, but the costs of sufficient battery is too large, so far. That is changing.
"Maintenance costs of the lines may be increased by electrification, but many systems claim lower costs due to reduced wear-and-tear on the track from lighter rolling stock. There are some additional maintenance costs associated with the electrical equipment around the track, such as power sub-stations and the catenary wire itself, but, if there is sufficient traffic, the reduced track and especially the lower engine maintenance and running costs exceed the costs of this maintenance significantly."
We once dammed basically every river in the nation because it was in vogue at the time.
Maybe building overhead power lines for rail infrastructure should be the "hip" thing right now instead of AI. Maybe building oodles of solar power farms and batteries should be "hip"
We built electrical infrastructure to the most remote residences just because we could and because it was an investment in our people. We directly funded our massive and formerly world class rail network because we could, and because it would pay off. We built a world class road network half as a make-work project, and it still pays dividends. We purchased Alaska, with no obvious reason. We built a space program to have slightly better nuclear weapons, and it's part of the reason we were so dominant in computer chips for so long.
We have spent something like 40 trillion dollars over the past 25 years, and almost none of it on anything of real value. More than a little of that debt is just handouts to already rich people.
We can build new electric transmission lines and I'm so tired of things that we absolutely 100% can do if we just demand it be done being somehow treated as a problem. America can afford infrastructure.
That's a complicated question that unfortunately has quite a bit of "well it depends" in the answer. I worked in the auto industry for a long time - both doing engine development and EVs - so my opinions here are well-informed but not world expert.
From a pure energy efficiency perspective you can't beat economies of scale. A stationary power plant (even ones that are just big gasoline engines) run at a constant load and RPM so they can be optimized for pure efficiency, they rarely have to start, warm up, and shut down, and they can use larger and more expensive exhaust aftertreatment systems. Most energy conversions grow more efficient with scale and this is no different. The locomotive powertrain works for a handful of reasons but one of them is you can build much more efficient engines that are optimized for a single constant speed and load. But most of the advancements in internal combustion engines over the last 20-30 years don't increase peak efficiency but increase the conditions in which they're efficient. Variable valve timing and lift are probably the most underrated and overpowered technologies that have transformed engines from having one narrow regime of high efficiency to running well over a huge range of the map. But turbocharging, variable intake geometries, 7+ speed transmissions, and mild hybrid systems like belt-starter-generators get honorable mentions here. However we're not talking about anything close to EV-levels of efficiency. I think the cutting edge research engines are running in the mid to high 40s for thermal efficiency (percentage of fuel energy captured as useful work), most passenger car engines probably peak in the mid 30s.
So while there is some efficiency to be gained by a more locomotive-style system it's not as much as you would hope. In the industry that's called a series hybrid system, vs a parallel hybrid system where either ICE or EV power can go to the wheels. The benefits of a series system are more emissions and product features. You can get the full torque and power of an EV, you can start and stop the IC engine in a more emissions optimized way, and and you can filter load spikes to use a small engine that meets average not peak load.
From a more pragmatic perspective, with the energy density of gasoline and other liquid fuels it's probably best to use it in applications for which you just can't use full electrification. Planes are currently the best example of this. It's also worth noting that passenger cars benefit massively from strong hybridization because of the uneven load cycles so that's a technology where you can deploy a gasoline engine but then claw back a lot of the efficiency losses with hybrids. That's not always true, for example boats don't really have a regen cycle so hybridization just doesn't get much.
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