Random Articles (Page 7)
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π Berlin Key
The Berlin key (also known as, German, SchlieΓzwangschlΓΌssel, or, in English, forced-locking key) is a key for a type of door lock. It was designed to force people to close and lock their doors, usually a main entrance door or gate leading into a common yard or tenement block. The key was a solution to the problem of access via communal doors of such blocks (Mietskaserne) as early as the 19th century.
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- "Berlin Key" | 2019-09-29 | 446 Upvotes 147 Comments
π Toss Bombing
Toss bombing (sometimes known as loft bombing, and by the U.S. Air Force as the Low Altitude Bombing System, LABS) is a method of bombing where the attacking aircraft pulls upward when releasing its bomb load, giving the bomb additional time of flight by starting its ballistic path with an upward vector.
The purpose of toss bombing is to compensate for the gravity drop of the bomb in flight, and allow an aircraft to bomb a target without flying directly over it. This is in order to avoid overflying a heavily defended target, or in order to distance the attacking aircraft from the blast effects of a nuclear (or conventional) bomb.
Discussed on
- "Toss Bombing" | 2019-09-15 | 50 Upvotes 6 Comments
π Mt.Gox does not mean "Mount" Gox
Mt. Gox was a bitcoin exchange based in Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan. Launched in July 2010, by 2013 and into 2014 it was handling over 70% of all bitcoin (BTC) transactions worldwide, as the largest bitcoin intermediary and the world's leading bitcoin exchange.
In February 2014, Mt. Gox suspended trading, closed its website and exchange service, and filed for bankruptcy protection from creditors. In April 2014, the company began liquidation proceedings.
Mt. Gox announced that approximately 850,000 bitcoins belonging to customers and the company were missing and likely stolen, an amount valued at more than $450 million at the time. Although 200,000 bitcoins have since been "found", the reasons for the disappearanceβtheft, fraud, mismanagement, or a combination of theseβwere initially unclear. New evidence presented in April 2015 by Tokyo security company WizSec led them to conclude that "most or all of the missing bitcoins were stolen straight out of the Mt. Gox hot wallet over time, beginning in late 2011."
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- "Mt.Gox does not mean "Mount" Gox" | 2013-04-12 | 51 Upvotes 43 Comments
π Railway Time
Railway time was the standardised time arrangement first applied by the Great Western Railway in England in November 1840, the first recorded occasion when different local mean times were synchronised and a single standard time applied. The key goals behind introducing railway time were to overcome the confusion caused by having non-uniform local times in each town and station stop along the expanding railway network and to reduce the incidence of accidents and near misses, which were becoming more frequent as the number of train journeys increased.
Railway time was progressively taken up by all railway companies in Great Britain over the following seven years. The schedules by which trains were organised and the time station clocks displayed were brought in line with the local mean time for London or "London Time", the time set at Greenwich by the Royal Observatory, which was already widely known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).
The development of railway networks in North America in the 1850s, India in around 1860, and in Europe, prompted the introduction of standard time influenced by geography, industrial development, and political governance.
The railway companies sometimes faced concerted resistance from local people who refused to adjust their public clocks to bring them into line with London Time. As a consequence, two different times would be displayed in the town and in use, with the station clocks and the times published in train timetables differing by several minutes from that on other clocks. Despite this early reluctance, railway time rapidly became adopted as the default time across the whole of Great Britain, although it took until 1880 for the government to legislate on the establishment of a single standard time and a single time zone for the country.
Some contemporary commentators referred to the influence of railway time on encouraging greater precision in daily tasks and the demand for punctuality.
Discussed on
- "Railway Time" | 2023-10-07 | 94 Upvotes 45 Comments
π Hoover (Seal)
Hoover (c.β1971 β July 25, 1985) was a harbor seal who was able to imitate basic human speech.
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- "Hoover (Seal)" | 2021-09-02 | 102 Upvotes 9 Comments
π Vatican Best Films List
In 1995, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of cinema, the Vatican compiled a list of 45 "great films". The 45 movies are divided into three categories: religion, values, and art.
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- "Vatican Best Films List" | 2021-07-19 | 63 Upvotes 46 Comments
π Eiffel programming language
Eiffel is an object-oriented programming language designed by Bertrand Meyer (an object-orientation proponent and author of Object-Oriented Software Construction) and Eiffel Software. Meyer conceived the language in 1985 with the goal of increasing the reliability of commercial software development; the first version becoming available in 1986. In 2005, Eiffel became an ISO-standardized language.
The design of the language is closely connected with the Eiffel programming method. Both are based on a set of principles, including design by contract, commandβquery separation, the uniform-access principle, the single-choice principle, the openβclosed principle, and optionβoperand separation.
Many concepts initially introduced by Eiffel later found their way into Java, C#, and other languages. New language design ideas, particularly through the Ecma/ISO standardization process, continue to be incorporated into the Eiffel language.
Discussed on
- "Eiffel programming language" | 2020-02-09 | 109 Upvotes 72 Comments
π Mars Curiosity Operating System: VxWorks
VxWorks is a real-time operating system (RTOS) developed as proprietary software by Wind River Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of TPG Capital, US. First released in 1987, VxWorks is designed for use in embedded systems requiring real-time, deterministic performance and, in many cases, safety and security certification, for industries, such as aerospace and defense, medical devices, industrial equipment, robotics, energy, transportation, network infrastructure, automotive, and consumer electronics.
VxWorks supports Intel architecture, POWER architecture, ARM architectures and RISC-V. The RTOS can be used in multicore asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP), symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), and mixed modes and multi-OS (via Type 1 hypervisor) designs on 32- and 64-bit processors.
VxWorks comes with the kernel, middleware, board support packages, Wind River Workbench development suite and complementary third-party software and hardware technologies. In its latest release, VxWorks 7, the RTOS has been re-engineered for modularity and upgradeability so the OS kernel is separate from middleware, applications and other packages. Scalability, security, safety, connectivity, and graphics have been improved to address Internet of Things (IoT) needs.
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- "Mars Curiosity Operating System: VxWorks" | 2012-08-06 | 93 Upvotes 44 Comments
π M-DISC: The storage medium that lasts 1000 years
M-DISC (Millennial Disc) is a write-once optical disc technology introduced in 2009 by Millenniata, Inc. and available as DVD and Blu-ray discs.
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- "M-DISC: The storage medium that lasts 1000 years" | 2024-09-18 | 11 Upvotes 2 Comments
π Untouchable Number
An untouchable number is a positive integer that cannot be expressed as the sum of all the proper divisors of any positive integer (including the untouchable number itself). That is, these numbers are not in the image of the aliquot sum function. Their study goes back at least to Abu Mansur al-Baghdadi (circa 1000 AD), who observed that both 2 and 5 are untouchable.
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- "Untouchable Number" | 2023-08-25 | 108 Upvotes 57 Comments