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🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Free and open-source software 🔗 Websites 🔗 Websites/Computing

Advogato was an online community and social networking site dedicated to free software development and created by Raph Levien. In 2007, Steve Rainwater took over maintenance and new development from Raph. In 2016, Rainwater's running instance was shut down and backed up to archive.org.

🔗 United States 🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Telecommunications

The Iridium satellite constellation provides L-band voice and data information coverage to satellite phones, pagers and integrated transceivers over the entire Earth surface. Iridium Communications owns and operates the constellation, additionally selling equipment and access to its services. It was originally conceived by Bary Bertiger, Raymond J. Leopold and Ken Peterson in late 1987 (in 1988 protected by patents Motorola filed in their names) and then developed by Motorola on a fixed-price contract from July 29, 1993, to November 1, 1998, when the system became operational and commercially available.

The constellation consists of 66 active satellites in orbit, required for global coverage, and additional spare satellites to serve in case of failure. Satellites are in low Earth orbit at a height of approximately 781 km (485 mi) and inclination of 86.4°. Orbital velocity of the satellites is approximately 27,000 km/h (17,000 mph). Satellites communicate with neighboring satellites via K_a band inter-satellite links. Each satellite can have four inter-satellite links: one each to neighbors fore and aft in the same orbital plane, and one each to satellites in neighboring planes to either side. The satellites orbit from pole to same pole with an orbital period of roughly 100 minutes. This design means that there is excellent satellite visibility and service coverage especially at the North and South poles. The over-the-pole orbital design produces "seams" where satellites in counter-rotating planes next to one another are traveling in opposite directions. Cross-seam inter-satellite link hand-offs would have to happen very rapidly and cope with large Doppler shifts; therefore, Iridium supports inter-satellite links only between satellites orbiting in the same direction. The constellation of 66 active satellites has six orbital planes spaced 30° apart, with 11 satellites in each plane (not counting spares). The original concept was to have 77 satellites, which is where the name Iridium came from, being the element with the atomic number 77 and the satellites evoking the Bohr model image of electrons orbiting around the Earth as its nucleus. This reduced set of six planes is sufficient to cover the entire Earth surface at every moment.

Because of the shape of the original Iridium satellites' reflective antennas, the first generation satellites focus sunlight on a small area of the Earth surface in an incidental manner. This results in an effect called Iridium flares, where the satellite momentarily appears as one of the brightest objects in the night sky and can be seen even during daylight. Newer Iridium satellites do not produce flares.

🔗 Library of Congress 🔗 Classical music 🔗 Albums

In C is a musical piece composed by Terry Riley in 1964 for an indefinite number of performers. He suggests "a group of about 35 is desired if possible but smaller or larger groups will work". A series of short melodic fragments that can be repeated at the discretion of musicians, In C is often cited as the first minimalist composition to make a significant impact on the public consciousness.

The piece was first performed by Steve Reich, Jon Gibson, Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, Morton Subotnick and others at the San Francisco Tape Music Center. It received its first recorded release in 1968 on CBS Records. Subsequent performances have been recorded many times since.

In 2022, the 1968 LP recording of In C was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Recording Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.".

🔗 Intel

Intel's Skulltrail is an enthusiast gaming platform that was released on February 19, 2008. It is based on the company's 5400 "Seaburg" workstation chipset. The primary difference between Skulltrail and Intel's current and past enthusiast chipsets is a dual CPU socket design that allows two processors to operate on the same motherboard. Therefore, Skulltrail can operate eight processing cores on one system. The platform supports two Core 2 Extreme QX9775 processors (commonly mistaken for the Core 2 Extreme QX9770, which is the LGA775 counterpart), which operate at 3.2 GHz.

Skulltrail was one of the first platforms to support SLI on chipsets not designed by Nvidia. It achieves this by including two NVIDIA nForce 100 PCIe 1.1 switch (two x16 to one x16) chips. The implementation of SLI supports Quad SLI technology, which is achieved through the use of two dual-GPU graphics cards from NVIDIA, including the GeForce 9800 GX2. This gives a total of four graphics processors. Owners of Skulltrail systems can also make use of up to four ATI graphics cards using ATI CrossFireX technology, which made SkullTrail the only platform (other than Intel X58 and P55 Chipset) to support both SLI and CrossFire with public drivers at the time of release. The HP Firebird 803 also supported SLI on one (proprietary, MXM) motherboard at the time, but the drivers were special and only available for Firebird hardware.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Computer science

C-- (pronounced C minus minus) is a C-like programming language. Its creators, functional programming researchers Simon Peyton Jones and Norman Ramsey, designed it to be generated mainly by compilers for very high-level languages rather than written by human programmers. Unlike many other intermediate languages, its representation is plain ASCII text, not bytecode or another binary format.

There are two main branches:

• C--, the original branch, with the final version 2.0 released in May 2005
• Cmm, the fork actively used as the intermediate representation (IR) in the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC)

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 Politics 🔗 United States/District of Columbia

The trillion-dollar coin is a concept that emerged during the United States debt-ceiling crisis in 2011, as a proposed way to bypass any necessity for the United States Congress to raise the country's borrowing limit, through the minting of very high-value platinum coins. The concept gained more mainstream attention by late 2012 during the debates over the United States fiscal cliff negotiations and renewed debt-ceiling discussions. After reaching the headlines during the week of January 7, 2013, use of the trillion dollar coin concept was ultimately rejected by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury..

The concept of the trillion-dollar coin was reintroduced in March 2020 in the form of a congressional proposal during the 2020 stock market crash.

🔗 Mathematics

In information visualization and graphic design, Truchet tiles are square tiles decorated with patterns that are not rotationally symmetric. When placed in a square tiling of the plane, they can form varied patterns, and the orientation of each tile can be used to visualize information associated with the tile's position within the tiling.

Truchet tiles were first described in a 1704 memoir by Sébastien Truchet entitled "Mémoire sur les combinaisons", and were popularized in 1987 by Cyril Stanley Smith.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory

MOLLE (pronounced , similar in pronunciation to the name Molly) is an acronym for Modular Lightweight Load-carrying Equipment. It is used to define the current generation of load-bearing equipment and backpacks used by a number of NATO armed forces, especially the British Army and the United States Army.

The system's modularity is derived from the use of Pouch Attachment Ladder System (PALS) webbing equipment as rows of heavy-duty nylon stitched onto the vest to allow for the attachment of various compatible pouches and accessories. This method of attachment has become a de facto standard for modular tactical gear, replacing the All-purpose Lightweight Individual Carrying Equipment (ALICE) system used in the earliest modular vest systems (which is still in use with many police forces).

🔗 Songs 🔗 The Beatles 🔗 The Beatles/George Harrison 🔗 The Beatles/John Lennon 🔗 The Beatles/Ringo Starr 🔗 The Beatles/Paul McCartney

"Now and Then" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles. It was released on 2 November 2023, dubbed "the last Beatles song." It appeared on a double A-side single, paired with a new mix of the band's first single, "Love Me Do" (1962), with the two serving as "bookends" to the band's history. Both songs are to be included on the expanded re-issues of the 1973 compilations 1962–1966 and 1967–1970, to be released on 10 November 2023.

"Now and Then" is a psychedelic rock ballad. John Lennon wrote and recorded it around 1977 as a solo piano home demo, but left it unfinished. After Lennon's death in 1980, the song was considered as the third Beatles reunion single for their 1995–1996 retrospective project The Beatles Anthology, following "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love", both based on Lennon's demos. Instead, it was shelved for nearly three decades. It was later completed by the surviving bandmates Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, with overdubs and included guitar tracks by George Harrison from the abandoned 1995 sessions.

The final version features additional lyrics by McCartney, and Lennon's voice extracted from the demo using the AI-backed audio restoration technology commissioned by Peter Jackson for his 2021 documentary The Beatles: Get Back. Jackson also directed the music video for "Now and Then". The song received acclaim from critics, who felt it was a worthy finale for the Beatles.