Men landed on the moon 48 years ago. The technology is still stunning. I still find it incredible that all this was achieved with computing power you would easily find in a contemporary washing machine, toaster or a digital watch; indeed, the microprocessors or microcontrollers in such equipment have far more power and cost anywhere up to $2 a piece.
With that in mind, here’s some superbly immersive websites that sync all the video and audio as well as stills of the lunar landings.
This is a continuous loop of of Apollo 17 from launch to life on the lunar surface with photos and video. Again, superb. http://apollo17.org
And then fast forward to today. Space-X is launching rockets that dump the payload into orbit and then the fist stage rocket section falls back to earth and lands vertically on the landing pad, ready for repair and re-use. Off. The. Hook.
Check out this tweet form Mr. Edward Snowden. Interesting indeed. PGP still looks intact in its raw form. This is good news. Assuming the end point device has not been compromised of course and the password and private key snarfed.
That said, that is something really only a state player or well financed operative will have a shot at. For the regular folk using PGP means always having your thoughts and ideas protected.
If somebody gets access to your mail server, as per Hillary Clinton, at least the attacker will have squigabytes worth of nothing and nobody finds out about your involvement with Saudi, mis-handling classified documents, Libya and the Clinton Foundation.
Your email was intercepted. Two words. “Shit” and “Jack”.
posted under General, Linux Tips | Comments Off on Good to (not) know
Here’s an interesting one. I did not know that the term ‘patch’ as used to mean “apply an update to software” comes from the first computers.
In the days of punched paper tape, where binary commands were loaded into memory from tape, instead of recreating an entire punched paper tape to correct the software, a piece of sticky tape was applied to the paper tape to cover the hole in the paper and change the command, thus literally patching the software.
I saw this the other day while looking at the TV series “Mad Men”. Everybody deserves to do a presentation to clients once in their lives and smash it this hard. A demonstration of the killer Don Draper pitch. TV perfection.
