Spaaaaace (Part 1)

Bezos’ engineers dream of Blue Ring space platform in orbit by 2025

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Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellites prepare for testing after one late Prime delivery

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Now we can blame spacecraft for polluting the atmosphere

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Billionaires don’t need to promise things they can actually do, they just need to let investors know they have ideas for things they might do someday, to make it clear there’s a path for the companies to keep growing forever. The date is just to make it visible to them, because everyone knows they don’t understand timespans longer than a couple years. :unamused:

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Fixed the timespan to be more accurate

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okay, okay, sure. but what if we made a metaverse, and put it in space!

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It’s full of stars! Galactic atlas catalogs 400k Milky Way neighbors

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Astroboffins spot high-power 8b year old radio burst from pre-Earth event

An international team of scientists have discovered a fast radio burst (FRB) so distant that it blows the previous record away, but is still one of the brightest they’ve ever seen.

It took the signal from FRB 20220610A around eight billion years to reach Earth in June of last year, making it around 50 percent older than the previous distance record holder. In just a few milliseconds, the FRB released the same amount of energy as our Sun does in 30 years, they estimate. For reference, the average FRB is believed to release the equivalent of three days of the Sun’s energy output.

[…]

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But of course it’s cloudy here…

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Patch Tuesday … in Spaaaace!

eta:

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… that’s so random :confused:

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The Gemini Guidance Computer was 3x 13 bit syllables for 39 bits. That makes for a good bonus question on the Floating Point section of a 3rd year CS numerics course. :grin:

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Liquid metal you say…

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there’s not much on wikipedia about why, only that it and 36 bit were popular early formats

my favorite theory comes from here - where someone pointed out that with 36 bit you could put an entire instruction and address in one word


( edit: yup. it’s exactly that )

On an architectural level, the CCS processors contained an instruction interpreter, data path control, and registers (18-bit accumulator, 12-bit link register, 12-bit program counter, 4-bit condition code register) which operated in serial. Instructions were 18-bit words, with the most significant 12-bits containing addresses (4k of direct addressing), and the least significant 6-bits containing operation codes (64 instructions).

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The CDC Cyber at university had a 60 bit word, and used ones compliment math. (It had 0 and -0.)

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