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🔗 Apple Inc. 🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing

A/UX is a Unix-based operating system from Apple Computer for Macintosh computers, integrated with System 7's graphical interface and application compatibility. It is Apple's first official Unix-based operating system, launched in 1988 and discontinued in 1995 with version 3.1.1. A/UX requires select 68k-based Macintosh models with an FPU and a paged memory management unit (PMMU), including the Macintosh II, SE/30, Quadra, and Centris series.

Described by InfoWorld as "an open systems solution with the Macintosh at its heart", A/UX is based on UNIX System V Release 2.2, with features from System V Releases 3 and 4 and BSD versions 4.2 and 4.3. It is POSIX- and System V Interface Definition (SVID)-compliant and includes TCP/IP networking since version 2. Having a Unix-compatible, POSIX-compliant operating system enabled Apple to bid for large contracts to supply computers to U.S. federal government institutes.

🔗 Visual arts

SONATA VI are two paintings, Stellar sonata. Allegro and Stellar sonata. Andante, of Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis from 1908.

🔗 Death 🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Women's History

Laudatio Turiae ("In praise of Turia") is a tombstone engraved with a carved epitaph that is a husband's eulogy of his wife. It was made in the late 1st century BC. It portrays the love of a husband for his loyal wife.

🔗 Companies 🔗 France 🔗 Automobiles 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Business and economy 🔗 Japan/Car

The Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi Alliance, originally known as the Renault–Nissan Alliance, is a French-Japanese strategic alliance between the automobile manufacturers Renault (based in Boulogne-Billancourt, France), Nissan (based in Yokohama, Japan) and Mitsubishi Motors (based in Tokyo, Japan), which together sell more than 1 in 9 vehicles worldwide. Renault and Nissan are strategic partners since 1999 and have nearly 450,000 employees and control eight major brands: Renault, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Infiniti, Renault Korea, Dacia, Alpine, and Venucia. The car group sold 10.6 million vehicles worldwide in 2017, making it the leading light vehicle manufacturing group in the world. The Alliance adopted its current name in September 2017, one year after Nissan acquired a controlling interest in Mitsubishi and subsequently made Mitsubishi an equal partner in the Alliance.

As of December 2021, the Alliance is one of the world's leading electric vehicle manufacturing groups, with global sales of over 1 million light-duty electric vehicles since 2009. The top selling vehicles of its EV line-up are the Nissan Leaf and the Renault Zoe all-electric cars.

The strategic partnership between Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi is not a merger or an acquisition. The three companies are joined through a cross-sharing agreement. The structure was unique in the auto industry during the 1990s consolidation trend and later served as a model for General Motors and the PSA Group, and Mitsubishi, as well as the Volkswagen Group and Suzuki, though the latter combination failed. The Alliance itself has broadened its scope substantially, forming additional partnerships with automakers including Germany's Daimler and China's Dongfeng.

Following the November 2018 arrest and imprisonment of Alliance chairman and CEO Carlos Ghosn, accompanied by his dismissal from the alliance and its components, press analysts have questioned both the stability of the Alliance's shareholding agreement and its long-term existence. These analysts also note that, because the companies' recent business strategies are interdependent, attempts to restructure the Alliance could be counter-productive for all of the members.

In January 2023, Renault and Nissan moved to restructure their alliance in order to recover from Ghosn's arrest and manage through a post-Covid economy. The primary objective was to give both companies more autonomy.

🔗 Human rights 🔗 Disability 🔗 South Africa 🔗 Primates

Jack (died 1890) was a chacma baboon, who attained some fame for acting as an assistant to a disabled railway signalman in South Africa.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Meteorology 🔗 Skepticism

A sun dog (or sundog) or mock sun, formally called a parhelion (plural parhelia) in meteorology, is an atmospheric optical phenomenon that consists of a bright spot to one or both sides of the Sun. Two sun dogs often flank the Sun within a 22° halo.

The sun dog is a member of the family of halos, caused by the refraction of sunlight by ice crystals in the atmosphere. Sun dogs typically appear as a pair of subtly colored patches of light, around 22° to the left and right of the Sun, and at the same altitude above the horizon as the Sun. They can be seen anywhere in the world during any season, but are not always obvious or bright. Sun dogs are best seen and most conspicuous when the Sun is near the horizon.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Microsoft Windows 🔗 Microsoft Windows/Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Microsoft 🔗 JavaScript 🔗 Microsoft/.NET

JScript is Microsoft's dialect of the ECMAScript standard that is used in Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

JScript is implemented as an Active Scripting engine. This means that it can be "plugged in" to OLE Automation applications that support Active Scripting, such as Internet Explorer, Active Server Pages, and Windows Script Host. It also means such applications can use multiple Active Scripting languages, e.g., JScript, VBScript or PerlScript.

JScript was first supported in the Internet Explorer 3.0 browser released in August 1996. Its most recent version is JScript 9.0, included in Internet Explorer 9.

JScript 10.0 is a separate dialect, also known as JScript .NET, which adds several new features from the abandoned fourth edition of the ECMAScript standard. It must be compiled for .NET Framework version 2 or version 4, but static type annotations are optional.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Telecommunications 🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Electrical engineering 🔗 Glass

A photon sieve is a device for focusing light using diffraction and interference. It consists of a flat sheet of material full of pinholes that are arranged in a pattern which is similar to the rings in a Fresnel zone plate, but a sieve brings light to much sharper focus than a zone plate. The sieve concept, first developed in 2001, is versatile because the characteristics of the focusing behaviour can be altered to suit the application by manufacturing a sieve containing holes of several different sizes and different arrangement of the pattern of holes.

Photon sieves have applications to photolithography. and are an alternative to lenses or mirrors in telescopes and terahertz lenses and antennas.

When the size of sieves is smaller than one wavelength of operating light, the traditional method mentioned above to describe the diffraction patterns is not valid. The vectorial theory must be used to approximate the diffraction of light from nanosieves. In this theory, the combination of coupled-mode theory and multiple expansion method is used to give an analytical model, which can facilitate the demonstration of traditional devices such as lenses and holograms.

🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Physics 🔗 Alternative Views

A quantum vacuum thruster (QVT or Q-thruster) is a theoretical system hypothesized to use the same principles and equations of motion that a conventional plasma thruster would use, namely magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), to make predictions about the behavior of the propellant. However, rather than using a conventional plasma as a propellant, a QVT would interact with quantum vacuum fluctuations of the zero-point field.

The concept is controversial and generally not considered physically possible. However, if QVT systems were possible they could eliminate the need to carry propellant, being limited only by the availability of energy.