text:
Meteor Blast Injures Hundreds
At approximately 9 a.m. Friday morning, a meteor ripped through the sky above Russia’s Urals region, exploded with a loud boom and produced a shock wave that damaged buildings and injured more than 700 people.
Although injury reports continue to climb, the majority have been minor cuts and scrapes resulting from the glass shattered in buildings where people work or reside. Thankfully, though, no deaths have been reported, at least not yet.
Schools and hospitals were also affected, but again no one was seriously hurt.
According to Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, one large meteoroid entered Earth’s atmosphere and shattered into fragments, sending meteors of varying sizes across the Russian landscape. The governor of Chelyabinsk even reported finding a large chunk in a nearby lake.
This isn’t the first time Russia has been slammed by space debris. In 1908, a huge asteroid exploded over Siberia and levelled trees across an area of more than 800 square miles. Of course, the area was so sparsely populated that humans remained largely unaffected.
Heck, I’m not even sure Siberia is all that populated now. Isn’t that where Russia ships its worst inmates to serve out their sentences in cold, remote prisons? Granted, I’m American and may be completely misinformed, but that’s what I’ve always heard.
I have to admit that this story is exciting, but it’s also kind of troubling. Films like Armageddon and Deep Impact considered what might happen if a large asteroid came barreling towards Earth. And I’m not talking about some little space rock, either. I’m talking about a big boy capable of destroying us all.
In each film, humans reacted by sending a team of astronauts, miners, drillers and other “specialists” into space to plant bombs on the asteroid and blow it to smithereens before it even came close to our planet. In reality, though, something like this would never happen. Aside from the exorbitant cost of such a mission, which would have to be shouldered by many nations rather than a few, the odds of people actually working together and coming to some agreement quickly might be impossible. By the time all the politicians and military leaders finally do agree, it will likely be too late.
The fortunate thing is that most experts discount the possibility of this ever happening or consider the odds extremely remote. Then again, there is an asteroid known as 2012 DA14 that is supposed to pass by Earth soon and could destroy us if it decides to change course. The last report I heard estimated its size at roughly 45 meters (or 50 yards, for those of you not comfortable with the metric system). And even though it’s estimated to come no closer than 17,000 miles from our celestial home, I won’t breathe easy until it’s finally moving in the opposite direction.
Doomsday preppers and other would-be soothsayers will probably view this Russian meteor explosion and the impending asteroid fly by as signs that the end is near. And who knows? They could be right.
For me, though, this represents just one more thing that could spell disaster for humankind. It just has to get in line behind violence, economic meltdowns, climate change and everything else that plagues our society.


Transportation Minister Ric McIver issued the following statement marking Motorcycle Safety Awareness Month:
“Now that the weather has warmed up and the snow has finally melted, it’s time for Albertans to think about motorcycle safety.
“I love riding, and look forward to the beginning of each motorcycle season – especially this year after being stuck inside for so long. But while we crave the freedom of the open highway, it’s important to remember that everyone needs to do their part to keep motorcyclists safe on the road.
“May is Motorcycle Safety Awareness Month and I would like to remind all motorists of the role they play in keeping motorcyclists safe. Due to their smaller size, motorcycles are often hard to see and require extra room to prevent serious accidents. When motorcycles crash, their riders lack the protection of an enclosed vehicle and are more likely to be injured or killed. In a typical year, about 30 motorcyclists die and more than 600 are injured on Alberta roads.
“Drivers should keep motorcyclists in mind when changing lanes, making left turns or following close behind.
“Riders can protect themselves by monitoring road and gravel conditions, manoeuvring with caution and always wearing appropriate protective gear.
“When riders and drivers are respectful and look out for each other, motorcycle season is safer for everyone.”


The blockchain is in the middle of a major hype cycle at the moment, and that makes it hard for many people to take it seriously, but if you look at the core digital ledger technology, there is tremendous potential to change the way we think about trust in business. Yet these are still extremely early days and there are a number of missing pieces that need to be in place for the blockchain to really take off in the enterprise.
Suffice it to say that it has caught the fancy of major enterprise vendors with the likes of SAP, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon all looking at providing some level of Blockchain as a service for customers.
While the level of interest in blockchain remains fluid, a July 2017 survey
of 400 large companies by UK firm Juniper Research found 6 in 10 respondents were “either actively considering, or
Continue reading "The blockchain begins finding its way in the enterprise"
is capping off a rather impressive year without any major missteps in its final report for its performance in its 2018 fiscal year, posting a quarter that seems to have been largely non-offensive to Wall Street.
In the past year, Microsoft’s stock has gone up more than 40%. In the past two years, it’s nearly doubled. All of this came after something around a decade of that price not really doing anything as Microsoft initially missed major trends like the shift to mobile and the cloud. But since then, new CEO Satya Nadella has turned that around and increased the company’s focused on both, and Azure
is now one of the company’s biggest highlights. Microsoft is now an $800 billion company, which while still considerably behind Apple, Amazon and Google, is a considerable high considering the past decade.
In addition, Microsoft passed $100 billion in revenue for a fiscal
Continue reading "Microsoft caps off a fine fiscal year seemingly without any major missteps in its last quarter"
When you’re a company the size of Facebook
with more than two billion users on millions of servers, running thousands of configuration changes every day involving trillions of configuration checks, as you can imagine, configuration is kind of a big deal. As with most things with Facebook, they face scale problems few companies have to deal and often reach the limits of mere mortal tools.
To solve their unique issues, the company developed a new configuration delivery process called Location Aware Delivery or LAD for short. Before developing LAD, the company had been using an open source tool called Zoo Keeper to distribute configuration data, and while that tool worked, it had some fairly substantial limitations for a company the size of Facebook.
Perhaps the largest of those was being limited to 5 MB distributions with configurations limited to 2500 subscribers at a time. To give you a sense of
Continue reading "How Facebook configures its millions of servers every day"
, a startup that enables customers to manage a multi-cloud environment, announced today it was adding support for Google Cloud Platform.
With today’s addition, CloudHealth now supports AWS, Azure, VMware and Google, giving customers a fairly comprehensive view of their cloud usage.
Company co-founder and CTO Joe Kinsella says the company has been seeing inbound interest for Google Cloud support dating back to 2014, but up until now there hasn’t been enough interest to warrant a startup investing the resources necessary to support another platform. He says that has changed over the last 12-18 months as they’ve seen an increase in requests and decided to take the plunge.
Google Cloud cost summary page in CloudHealth. Screenshot: CloudHealth
“I think a lot of the initiatives that have been driven since Diane Greene joined Google
[at the end of 2015] and began really driving towards the enterprise are bearing fruit. And
Continue reading "CloudHealth adds support for Google Cloud amidst growing demand"
, the cloud identity management company, announced today it has purchased a startup called ScaleFT
to bring the Zero Trust concept
to the Okta platform. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
While Zero Trust isn’t exactly new to a cloud identity management company like Okta,
acquiring ScaleFT gives them a solid cloud-based Zero Trust foundation on which to continue to develop the concept internally.
“To help our customers increase security while also meeting the demands of the modern workforce, we’re acquiring ScaleFT to further our contextual access management vision — and ensure the right people get access to the right resources for the shortest amount of time,” Okta co-founder and COO Frederic Kerrest said in a statement.
Zero Trust is a security framework that acknowledges work no longer happens behind the friendly confines of a firewall. In the old days before mobile and cloud, you could be pretty
Continue reading "Okta nabs ScaleFT to build out ‘Zero Trust’ security framework"
Once upon a time, it looked like cloud-based serviced would become the central hub for analyzing all IoT data. But it didn’t quite turn out that way because most IoT solutions simply generate too much data to do this effectively and the round-trip to the data center doesn’t work for applications that have to react in real time. Hence the advent of edge computing, which is spawing its own ecosystem of startups.
Among those is Swim.ai
, which today announced that it has raised an $11 million Series B funding round let by Cambridge Innovation Capital, with participation from Silver Creek Ventures and Harris Barton Asset Management. The round also included a strategic investment from Arm, the chip design firm you may still remember as
ARM (but don’t write it like that or their PR department will promptly email you). This brings the company’s total funding to about $18 million.
Continue reading "Swim.ai raises $11M to bring real-time analytics to the edge"
the company offers a ‘Grab and Go’ program that allows employees to use self-service stations to quickly borrow and return Chromebooks without having to go through a lengthy IT approval process. Now
, it’s bringing this same idea to other businesses
Chromebooks have found their place in education and a number of larger enterprise companies are also getting on board
with the idea of a centrally managed device that mostly focuses on the browser. That’s maybe no surprise, given that both schools and enterprises are pretty much looking for the same thing from these devices.
At Google, the system has seen more than 30,000 users that have completed more than 100,000 loans so far.
While Google wants others to run similar programs (and use more Chromebooks in the process) it’s worth noting that this is a limited preview program and that Google isn’t building and selling racks or
Continue reading "Google’s new ‘Grab and Go’ project helps business loan Chromebooks to their employees"
Once a seemingly unstoppable retail juggernaut, Walmart’s been scrambling to define its digitally in this Amazon-defined era. This morning, the company announced that it’s struck a five-year deal with Microsoft, Amazon’s chief cloud competitor.
These sorts of partnerships are a regular occurrence for AWS — in fact, it announced one with Fortnite maker Epic Games, just this morning. The companies involved tend to put on a big show, in return for a discount on services, but Walmart and Microsoft are happily playing into the concept of teaming up to take on Amazon.
Microsoft’s certainly not making any bones about the competition. In an interview, Satya Nadella told The Wall Street Journal that the fight against Amazon “is absolutely core to this,” adding, “How do we get more leverage as two organizations that have depth and breadth and investment to be able to outrun our respective competition?”
Continue reading "Walmart enlists Microsoft cloud in battle against Amazon"
looks to increasingly expand its cashier-less grocery stories
— called Amazon Go – across different regions, there’s at least one startup hoping to end up everywhere else beyond Amazon’s empire.
aims to help businesses create that kind of checkout experience based on machine vision, using image recognition to figure out that a specific person is picking up and walking out the door with a bag of Cheetos. The company said it’s raised an additional $5.5 million in a round in what the company is calling a seed round extension from CRV. The play here is, like many startups, to create something that a massive company is going after — like image recognition for cashier-less checkouts — for the long tail businesses rather than locking them into a single ecosystem.
works with security cameras that have a bit more power than typical cameras to
Continue reading "Standard Cognition raises another $5.5M to create a cashier-less checkout experience"
Expense management software provider Certify
is beefing up its artillery against rival Concur with the acquisition of Abacus
, which enables companies to deal with expenses in real time. The deal’s financial terms were not disclosed. The addition of Abacus will help Certify, which includes other expense management solutions like Nexonia and ExpenseWatch under one umbrella, become a stronger rival to SAP-owned Concur by reaching new customer segments.
Founded by Omar Qari, Josh Halickman and Ted Power, Abacus says it was the first real-time expense reporting solution on the market when it launched in 2013
. The Y Combinator alum, whose investors included General Catalyst, Bessemer Venture Partners, Google Ventures and Salesforce Ventures, currently counts 1,000 customers. Its team will join Certify and the Abacus product will continue to be independent.
Expenses are a bane for everyone involved: the employees who need to turn in receipts, the managers who have to
Continue reading "Certify acquires real-time expense management startup and YC alum Abacus"
announced a $50 million Series D investment today, giving the company plenty of capital to keep expanding its business communications platform.
The round was led by Iconiq Capital with help from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Amasia, Scale Ventures, Section 32 and Work-Bench. With today’s round, the company has now raised $120 million.
As technology like artificial intelligence and internet of things advances, it’s giving the company an opportunity to expand its platform. Dialpad
products include UberConference conferencing software and VoiceAI for voice transcription applications.
The company is competing in a crowded market that includes giants like Google and Cisco and a host of smaller companies like GoToMeeting (owned by LogMeIn), Zoom and BlueJeans. All of these companies are working to provide cloud-based meeting and communications services.
Increasingly, that involves artificial intelligence like natural language processing (NLP) to provide on the fly transcription services. While none of these services is
Continue reading "Dialpad dials up $50M Series D led by Iconiq"
Last round before the IPO. That’s how Fastly
frames its new $40 million Series F round. It means that the company has raised $219 million over the past few years.
The funding round was led by Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners with participation from Sozo Ventures, Swisscom Ventures, and existing investors.
Fastly operates a content delivery network to speed up web requests. Let’s say you type nytimes.com in your browser. In the early days of the internet, your computer would send a request to one of The New York Times’ servers in a data center. The server would receive the request and send back the page to the reader.
But the web has grown immensely, and this kind of architecture is no longer sustainable. The New York Times use Fastly to cache its homepage, media and articles on Fastly’s servers. This way, when somebody types nytimes.com, Fastly already has
Continue reading "Fastly raises another $40 million before an IPO"
Even for the long-standing giants of the tech industry, quantum computing is one of the most complicated subjects to tackle. So how does a five-year old startup compete?
Chad Rigetti, the namesake founder of Rigetti Computing,
will join us at Disrupt SF 2018
to help us break it all down.
Rigetti’s approach to quantum computing is two-fold: on one front, the company is working on the design and fabrication of its own quantum chips; on the other, the company is opening up access to its early quantum computers for researchers and developers by way of its cloud computing platform, Forest
Rigetti Computing has raised nearly $70 million to date according to Crunchbase
, with investment from some of the biggest names around. Meanwhile, labs around the country are already using Forest to explore the possibilities ahead.
What’s the current state of quantum computing? How do we separate hype from reality?
Continue reading "Chad Rigetti to talk quantum computing at Disrupt SF"
Regardless of what you may think of Facebook
as a platform, they run a massive operation and when you reach their level of scale you have to get more creative in how you handle every aspect of your computing environment.
Engineers quickly reach the limits of human ability to track information to the point that checking logs and analytics becomes impractical and unwieldy on a system running thousands of services. This is a perfect scenario to implement machine learning and that is precisely what Facebook has done.
The company published a blog post today
about a self-tuning system they have dubbed Sprial. This is pretty nifty and what it does is essentially flip the idea of system tuning on its head. Instead of looking at some data and coding what you want the system to do, you teach the system the right way to do it and it does it
Continue reading "Facebook is using machine learning to self-tune its myriad of services"
today launched two new Azure
regions in China. These new regions, China North 2 in Beijing and China East 2 in Shanghai, are now generally available and will complement the existing two regions Microsoft operates in the country (with the help of its local partner, 21Vianet
As the first international cloud provider in China when it launched its first region there in 2014, Microsoft has seen rapid growth in the region and there is clearly demand for its services there. Unsurprisingly, many of Microsoft’s customers in China are other multinationals that are already betting on Azure for their cloud strategy. These include the likes of Adobe, Coke, Costco, Daimler, Ford, Nuance, P&G, Toyota and BMW
In addition to the new China regions, Microsoft also today launched a new availability zone for its region in the Netherlands. While availability zones have long been standard among the big cloud providers, Azure
Continue reading "Microsoft launches two new Azure regions in China"
For any company built on top of machine learning operations, the more data it has, the better it is off — as long as it can keep it all under control. But as more and more information pours in from disparate sources, gets logged in obscure databases and is generally hard (or slow) to query, the process of getting that all into one neat place where a data scientist can actually start running the statistics is quickly running into one of machine learning’s biggest bottlenecks.
That’s a problem Intermix.io
and its founders, Paul Lappas and Lars Kamp, hope to solve. Engineers get a granular look at all of the different nuances behind what’s happening with some specific function, from the query all the way through all of the paths it’s taking to get to its end result. The end product is one that helps data engineers monitor the flow of
Continue reading "Intermix.io looks to help data engineers find their worst bottlenecks"
devops platform that recently acquired Codeship
, today announced that it has raised a $62 million funding round. The round consists of a traditional $37 million equity round led by Delta-v Capital
and $25 million of growth financing from Golub Capital’s Late Stage Lending
. Existing investors, including Matrix Partners, Lightspeed Ventures, Unusual Ventures and Verizon Ventures, also participated.
With this round, CloudBees has now raised a total of over $100 million since it was founded back in 2010. In a fast-growing and competitive business like devops, that’s the kind of funding you need to be able to buy up smaller players and expand quickly to gain the kind of market share you need to compete with the other large players in this business.
“Today, virtually every company is using software to continuously improve its products and business,” said Matt Parson, CloudBees’ chief financial officer. “The DevOps market
Continue reading "CloudBees raises $62M for its devops platform"
The rapid pace of technology innovation and applications in recent decades — you could argue that just about every kind of business is a “tech” business these days — has spawned a sea of tech startups and larger businesses that are focused on serving that market, and equally demanding consumers, on a daily basis. Today, a venture capital firm in the UK is announcing a fund aimed at helping to grow the technologies that will underpin a lot of those daily applications.
Cambridge-based IQ Capital is raising £125 million ($165 million) that it will use specifically to back UK startups that are building “deep tech” — the layer of research and development, and potentially commercialised technology, that is considered foundational to how a lot of technology will work in the years and decades to come. So far, some £92 million has been secured, and partner Kerry Baldwin said that the
Continue reading "IQ Capital is raising £125M to invest in deep tech startups in the UK"
is giving developers a new storage option in its cloud. Cloud Filestore
, which will launch into beta next month
, essentially offers a fully managed network attached storage (NAS) service in the cloud. This means that companies can now easily run applications that need a traditional file system interface on the Google Cloud Platform.
Traditionally, developers who wanted access to a standard file system over the kind of object storage and database options that Google already offered had to rig up a file server
with a persistent disk. Filestore does away with all of this and simply allows Google Cloud users to spin up storage as needed.
The promise of Filestore is that it offers high throughput, low latency and high IOPS. The service will come in two tiers: premium and standard. The premium tier will cost $0.30 per GB and month and promises a throughput speed
Continue reading "With Cloud Filestore, the Google Cloud gets a new storage option"
, a startup that emerged from the Y Combinator Winter 2016
class to help companies use data and intelligence to increase sales, announced today that it was rebranding as Apollo. It also announced a $7 million Series A investment.
The round was led by Nexus Venture Partners. Social Capital and Y Combinator
also participated. Apparently Y Combinator liked what they saw enough to continue to invest in the company.
Apollo helps customers connect their sales people with the right person at the right time. That is typically a customer that is most likely to buy the product. It does this by combining a number of tools including a rules engine to automate prospect routing, a lead scoring tool and analytics to measure results at a granular level, among others.
The company also uses data they have collected from 200 million contacts at 10 million companies to match sellers to
Continue reading "YC grad ZenProspect rebrands as Apollo, lands $7 M Series A"


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Dhraakellian wrote: Dhraakellian wrote:
I have no idea how the following ended up in my post. Someone else wrote:I don't want to imagine how much energy and how effecient the transfer of it to the velocity would have to be to get a projectile going that fast.
Honestly I like to think plain and brutal. Build a huge, long cannon like the old style ship guns, get a nuke with a cannon ball on one end and shove it down the barrel, nuke first. Boom goes the nuke and woosh goes the cannon ball as fast as that nuke can blast it out that barrel... I wonder if a focused nuke blast alone would have much affect in space...
Probably need some insanely thick and strong barrel... Wouldn't like to know what the recoil would be like for the ship that fires it... maybe very small nukes rather than the full city or state wide killers.
First, I have absolutely no memory of writing this and, thus the editing of it into quote tags.
Second, if I'm going to use nukes in my weapon systems, I think I'd rather use them directly in the warheads rather than projectile launchers. I somehow doubt that nuclear explosion-launched projectiles are the most efficient way of doing things, and I'd prefer to have that hard radiation be released as far away from me as possible.
*LOL* my fault sorry. I've got admin permissions and must have accidentally hit "EDIT" against your post instead of "QUOTE"
The reason to use the nukes for propulsion as opposed to warheads is to get speed in your projectile. A nuke in a warhead usually means some kind of missile, torpedo or slower moving projectile that could potentially be shot down before it hits the target (as seems to still happen in Crimson Dark with poin-defence). So while a nuke should certainly cause more damage at the target, a nuke propelled projectile should have a better chance at zipping right through the defences and striking the target with considerable velocity and force, depending on the size. You'd likely use the smaller type nukes (I think they get as small as 10-15 kilotonnes today) for blasting the projectile and have some seriously sturdy gun barrel for withstanding the blast, particularly at the base.
Again, however, recoil would likely be a considerable problem for any ship which fires such a weapon. You'd probably need to use a barrel thats open at both ends and make sure an ally isn't tailing you.


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Gets the focus off dieting
A dieting mentality may be harmful because it limits your focus to your weight.
In fact, good nutrition is about much more than losing weight. It’s also about having enough energy and feeling healthy.
Focusing on real food instead of dieting can be a much more sustainable and enjoyable way to live. Instead of forcing weight loss, let weight loss come as a natural side effect of a better diet and improved metabolic health.
Opportunity to get money at ufa

domain: food


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text:
Jono Grant net worth is
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Jono Grant Net Worth 2018, Biography/Wiki, Married/Wedding
Jono Grant Net Worth $10 Million
Jono Grant net worth: Jono Grant was born in England, and started playing piano and guitar when he was a kid. He subsequently added synthesizers when he was a little old. From that point, he went to attend the University of Westminster, where he majored in Commercial Music. The label is now rather successful, and is famous for great production and superior musicianship. Jono Grant and Paavo Siljamki were invited to work with the remix of “House” with Tony McGuinness. The trio was fairly successful together and formed the production team, Above & Beyond. They’ve since released two successful records.

domain: artistic


text:
Collected Data: Charlemagne
- Was the first of 29 Holy Roman
- 12-4-771 A.D.
of all the Franks upon the death of his brother,
Carloman, King of Austrasia, and marries Hildegarde of
- 772 A.D.
Begins 13 year war with Saxons
that will end with their subjugation on the
- 773 A.D.
Frankish King to visit Rome, making it very clear he is
soverign even in papal lands.
He stood well over six feet
tall, had red hair and blue eyes. He was a superb athlete, and a merry man who was
capable of speaking Latin and understanding Greek.
Repudiated his 771 marriage to Hildegarde, citing that it was no longer valid.
- Absorbed Lombardy into Frankish Empire
Established rule in Venetia, Istria, Dalmatia, and
- 777 A.D.
Defeated Saxons, and
Invaded Moorish Spain.
- 778 A.D.
Basque forces annihilate Charlemagne's rear guard on August 15 at Roncesvalles. It is here that Charlemagne's paladin, Roland is killed. Song of Roland will later be wrote in rememberance.
- 780 A.D.
Encourages the three-field system of crop rotation in his realms.
- 782 A.D.
Executes 4,500 Saxon hostages at Verdun and imposes Christianity on the Saxons.
- 783 A.D.
Saxons rebel, and Charlemagne again kills Saxon prisoners.
- 785 A.D.
Subjugates Saxons again.
- 795 A.D.
Bans export of grain from his dominions in order to avoid food shortages.
- 796 A.D.
Forces reduce the Avars on the lower Danube.
- 12-25-800 A.D.
Crowned head of the Western Roman Empire at Rome on Christmas day, but he is not recognized by Irene, empress of the Eastern Roman Empire. At one time he was due to marry Irene, but he backed out of it after Irene had her son thrown in the dungeon, had his eyes put out with hot pokers, and proclaimed herself Empress.
- 809 A.D.
Famine sweeps the empire.
- 812 A.D.
Orders that anise, coriander, fennel, flax, fenugreek, sage, and other plants be planted on German imperial farms.
- 814 A.D.
Dies of Pleursy 1-28-814 at age of 71.
Established a common currency, the silver penny, and matched it with the values of Muslim coinage to encourage trade.
His capital was in Aachen.
Ordered the copying of many old manuscripts dating from the late empire.
"The Carolingian Miniscule"....Upper case and lower case letters, was devised at the palace school Charlemagne set up.

domain: history


text:
NL11226 In Stock
The Sterling Silver Baltic Amber Sailboat Pendant has exquisite detail. The pendant measures 1.25" long and hangs from a Sterling Silver bale that measures 3/8". The reflective Baltic Amber Stone was shaped to form the boat while the sails are crafted in Sterling Silver. The pendant is available on a Sterling Silver Rolo Chain in your choice of 16", 18" or 20". The sails are slightly concave giving the appearance of the wind flowing through while the Baltic Amber will reflect light and sun.
Eve's Addiction.com wants you to be a happy customer. We want you to be completely satisfied with the sterling silver jewelry that you receive from us, as we only sell high quality silver and cubic zirconia cz jewelry. We do understand that you may not like your purchase for some reason.
You may return or exchange your jewelry within 60 days of purchase if you are not satisfied with it. The jewelry must be returned in its original condition for a refund or exchange. Engraved, personalized, photo, monogram, name and initial, chocolate and clearance items are not returnable or exchangeable. To return jewelry to EvesAddiction.com, please follow the steps at the following link.

domain: design


Oftentimes those building their own small business and home storage servers are looking to save considerable amounts of money. In the process, users oftentimes look to the lowest cost motherboard they can find, with the wisdom that add-in cards can get the features that they want. On the other end of the spectrum are server motherboards like the Supermicro X8SI6-F that have everything or almost everything users need onboard. The Supermicro X8SI6-F costs in the $300 range, which would be a turn-off for many users, but when one looks at the features, $300 looks like a relative bargain.
Test Configuration (Base):
- CPU(s): Intel Core i3-530 and Intel Xeon X3440
- Motherboard: Supermicro X8SI6-F
- Memory: 2x 4GB kits of Kingston ECC 1333MHz DDR3 KVR1333D3E9SK2/4G (Unbuffered)
- Case: Norco RPC-4220
- Drives: 8x Hitachi 7,200rpm 2TB, 2x Western Digital Green 2TB, 6x Seagate 1.5TB 7,200rpm
- OS(es): Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V installed, Windows Home Server (in Hyper-V), Windows Home Server V2 Codename Vail (in Hyper-V), NexentaCore 3.0.1, OpenFiler (v2.3), FreeNAS (0.7.1), VMWare ESXi 4.1
The LGA1156 platform has been a strong platform for enthusiasts and is quickly catching on with HTPC users for its solid performance and low power consumption. Motherboard manufacturers like Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, and others all have enthusiast level boards with the LGA1156 chipset with multi-stage power (for overclocking), NF200 switched PCIe lanes, USB 3, SATA 3, onboard HD audio, HDMI outputs and etc. Some LGA1156 boards also include dual Realtek gigabit NICs although a single NIC is standard. Frankly, most if not all of these features are of low value in storage servers.
In a storage server, one typically looks for a few features:
1. Enough CPU power to perform any parity calculations required
2. Connectivity for multiple hard drives
3. Management features
4. Intel network ports
5. Compatible devices for a range of server operating systems
6. Enough RAM for cache purposes (especially important for ZFS caching)
7. Solid customer support and reliability
With the first item above being almost a given assuming a user properly sizes their CPU (few storage servers built on this platform will need a six core CPU), the remaining items will be the focus of this review.
Hard Drive Connectivity and the X8SI6-F… Awesome!
If there is one area that the X8SI6-F excels in, it is clearly in connecting hard drives. The X8SI6-F has an onboard Intel ICH controller as part of the 3420 chipset that provides six SATA 2.0 ports. This is a fairly standard feature on server motherboards. One will not find an eSATA port on the backplane because typically rack mount enclosures are large and internal storage is much preferred. Although the Intel ICH is a great controller, and does does support RAID functions, operating systems can have issues with the ICH in RAID mode. While Windows operating systems have no issues, operating systems such as OpenSolaris/ NexentaCore do not work well with “fake RAID” implementations found on chipset RAID solutions. Setting the controller to a non-RAID mode brings compatibility in line, and with the excellent latency characteristics, makes both hard drive performance and SSD performance (very important for cache/ L2ARC drive performance).
Going beyond the simple ICH, the X8SI6-F provides eight SAS 2.0 (6.0gpbs) ports onboard courtesy of a LSI SAS 2008 chip onboard. Connectivity is provided through two SFF-8087 ports which make cabling in chassis like the popular Norco RPC-4220 and RPC-4224 very clean. Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Home Server, various Linux flavors, OpenSolaris/ OpenIndiana/ NexentaCore and VMware ESX and ESXi all work really well with the LSI SAS 2008 controller.
For all intents and purposes, the Supermicro X8SI6-F’s onboard LSI SAS 2008 controller is equivalent to the LSI 9211-8i add-in card. Just for reference, the LSI 9211-8i retails for around $260 US. The important thing here is that even if the onboard controller did fail, one could purchase a compatible add-in card and recover the array. Just to test this, using Windows Server 2008 R2 I was able to unplug drives (all idling) from the onboard controller and into a LSI 9211-8i controller without the OS and was able to access the drives seconds later.
Aside from the obvious cost savings, both implementations support the very popular HP SAS Expander. Connecting one of the Supermicro X8SI6-F’s ports to the HP SAS Expander yields 32 SAS/SATA ports (through the SAS Expander), 4 additional SAS/ SATA ports (through the second SFF-8087 connector which can also be used with a second expander), and then 6 SATA ports via the Intel ICH. Adding one SFF-8087 to SFF-8087 cable and a HP SAS Expander gives connectivity for 42 drives! One could also either daisy chain the SAS Expanders or connect a SAS Expander to the second of the Supermicro X8SI6-F’s SAS ports and have connectivity for 70 drives.
One typical question I see on forums is how does the SAS 2008 chip perform with mechanical drives and a HP SAS Expander. Here is a preview ATTO Benchmark showing over 900MB/s to 1GB/s in read speeds which is more than adequate for many file servers. As a spoiler for an upcoming feature, the performance numbers are virtually identical to the discrete LSI 9211-8i’s performance.
For users looking to build systems with less than eight drives, this is not an issue. For users looking for a solution that can scale inexpensively, the X8SI6-F provides a clear value proposition.
One of the things that I consistently offer advice on is management features on any platform intended for server use. Ideally, a storage server’s only maintenance should be with its hard drives. Mechanical drives fail, and sometimes capacity needs to be expanded. Unfortunately, sometimes things go awry. A CPU heat sink clip may dislodge causing a CPU overheat situation. A kernel may panic causing the inability to login to a machine. An error prior to OS boot may cause a machine to become totally unresponsive. For all of these situations, server grade motherboards have features to help an administrator recover from a potentially negative situation.
I have discussed Supermicro’s IPMI implementation with KVM-over-IP at great length lately, including the highly recommended utility IPMIview. Like the other Supermicro “-F” boards reviewed here, the X8SI6-F’s IMPI 2.0 implementation utilizing the Nuvoton WPCM450 Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) includes ability to mount CD’s and DVD’s over the onboard dedicated 10/100 Realtek controller. The KVM-over-IP pulls a bit more bandwidth (<2mbps from what I have seen) than RDC, so being able to offload that traffic is not essential from a performance point of view, but it is welcome. Furthermore, the additional NIC allows the management interface to be placed on a separate management network which is a best practice considering that the BMC allows for remote rebooting and local console access over a network interface.
Bottom line, the IPMI 2.0 and KVM-over-IP functions on the Supermicro X8SI6-F and similar motherboards are simply must-haves for anyone except those running a server next to their desktop, and even then it is a nice to have. Recently I had a Hyper-V VM bring down a Windows Server 2008 R2 server and I was able to reboot the machine from my car en-route to dinner. It was the difference between having to miss dinner due to an unscheduled stop to the server (which was a 35 minute drive away each way) and a 90 second stop in the parking lot of the restaurant. Those situations are where building servers off of consumer grade hardware clearly do not pay off.
Intel Network Ports
Supermicro’s X8SI6-F, like the X8SIL-F it has two Intel 82574L based gigabit NICs onboard. Anyone reading my site will note that I am biased heavily in favor of Intel based gigabit NICs as they are the most consistently high-performing NICs that I have used. Furthermore, the compatibility of the 82577L with Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, VMware ESX and ESXi, and OpenSolaris is a given. The OS and Hypervisor support is generally very good for these Intel gigabit NICs. Second, I have seen much better throughput on Intel NIC to Intel NIC gigabit networks versus networks with Realtek and Marvell network controllers. After months of using Realtek NICs in my servers, the cost savings were just not worth it.
The Intel 82574L supports features like TCP/UDP CPU offloading and TSO for lower CPU utilization, PXE/ iSCSI boot, Jumbo frames, two transmit and receive queues per port, a 40KB packet buffer, and etc. For reference, the Intel 82574L is the same controller used in Intel’s Gigabit CT (EXPI9301CTBLK) PCIe x1 network adapter. In essence, the Supermicro X8SI6-F and similar motherboards save one $60-70 and a PCIe slot (if one were to get a dual port Intel NIC) or two versus a lower-cost board where NICs would be required separately. Another important note is that the onboard NICs do not require a raised PCB expansion card for network connectivity which helps airflow and also in 1U and 2U enclosures where expansion ports are limited, oftentimes requiring riser cards.
After installing, seven different operating systems/ hypervisors over the past ten days, the device compatibility is great. By that I mean that every operating system did not require searching for drivers in order to get all onboard components to work. The only issue was with FreeBSD/ FreeNAS installations which do not have default LSI SAS 2.0 drivers except for FreeBSD 9-Current.
With how finicky both OpenSolaris variants and VMware ESXi can be with drivers, having something that simply works out of the box is great. The Asus P6T7 WS Supercomputer, for example, was the exact opposite where ESXi 4.0 gave multiple compatibility errors during installation necessitating the use of add-in cards.
The Supermicro X8SI6-F is based on the Intel 3420 chipset. Paired with an Intel Xeon X34xx series CPU, the X8SI6-F supports up to 16GB of unbuffered ECC DIMMs in four slots. With registered ECC DIMMs, the X8SI6-F supports up to 32GB of memory. For users that are willing to risk their data to non-ECC DIMMs, the 16GB limit also applies. It should be noted that like other motherboards based on the 3400 series chipset, it is strongly recommended to use memory that are on the hardware compatibility list.
Internal USB Headers
A really nice feature of most server motherboards is the presence of an internal USB header. The Supermicro X8SI6-F has two such headers, much like the Supermicro X8ST3-F. This allows one to add two USB thumb drives to the interior of the enclosure housing the Supermicro X8SI6-F. For home and small business storage servers, this is an enormous benefit. FreeNAS, Openfiler, unRaid, untangle and many other operating systems can install directly to a relatively low-cost flash drive saving an onboard SATA port. Installed in the server’s enclosure, the USB stick will the USB drives are unlikely to become dislodged for any reason. With two such ports I have made it practice on my X8ST3-F based servers to have a secondary 2GB drive with a recovery Linux distribution in the event something goes severely awry. Having another boot option for the $20 or less cost of a USB drive has come in handy, especially when combined with the KVM-over-IP features of the X8SI6-F.
Expansion slot wise, the X8SI6-F has a two PCIe slots, one a PCIe 2.0 x8 slot and another PCIe x4 electrical in an x8 physical. For legacy cards, there is a PCI slot onboard also. One will note that this is one slot less than the X8SIL-F, which is due to the LSI SAS 2008 controller occupying those PCIe lanes. Unlike a LGA1366 platform, any LGA 1156 platform is going to have less available PCIe lanes (unless a PCIe switch is implemented and those are usually not recommended in server environments.)
Suffice to say, one is sacrificing a PCIe slot for an onboard SAS 2.0 RAID controller, but for anyone looking to purchase the X8SI6-F, this is a known and welcome tradeoff.
ATX Form Factor
In contrast to the mATX Supermicro X8SIL-F, the X8SI6-F is a full sized ATX motherboard. This has advantages and disadvantages. One advantage of this form factor is that it allows the SAS ports to line up very well with many enclosures that have front facing disk headers in the front left (looking at the drive bays) of the enclosure. Using 1ft cables I was easily able to connect the X8SI6-F’s SAS ports to both the Norco RPC-4220 drive backplanes as well as a HP SAS Expander sitting in the bottom PCIe slot (x4 electrical). The main disadvantage is that this will not fit if someone is looking to make a DIY JBOD DAS-SAS Expander enclosure as I provided a guide for earlier. I would, however, offer that this board is more appropriate for a user looking to make a head unit instead of a DAS disk shelf.
As one can see above the ATX form factor of the X8SI6-F is significantly larger than that of the mATX X8SIL-F.
Supermicro provides a nice package of six SATA cables and four SFF-8087 breakout cables. This means that for users installing the X8SI6-F in conventional tower cases or other chassis with individual backplane ports, the cables are there to support fourteen drives immediately.
The motherboard manual does a good job of explaining a lot of the jumper configurations for things like disabling onboard LAN, video and SAS. One will note that the IO back plane is actually the same as the X8SIL-F which is a big plus if you swap motherboards ever.
Supermicro Quality and Support
Supermicro competes in the enterprise space and therefore has great support for technically inclined users. For example, after receiving a X8SIL-F PCB Revision v1.01 which did not work with the Intel Core i3-530 I had installed, I contacted Supermicro support about this issue. It was a known incompatibility and Supermicro was willing to immediately exchange my board. Supermicro is one of those companies that I have found over the past decade that if you do your due diligence before contacting support (double-check everything and do a quick Google search), they do a great job helping you. Overall, I have installed approximately 50 Supermicro based systems in the past 18 months and have yet to experience a failure. A small sample size for sure, but it is the only measure of reliability that I have to go by.
When looking at a $300 motherboard, many users may automatically dismiss the hardware as overly expensive. On the other hand, the Supermicro X8SI6-F has an onboard equivelant of a $260 LSI 9211-8i and dual Intel Gigabit CT (EXPI9301CTBLK) network adapters ($35 each). Just those three components alone would cost more than $330 if purchased separately. The caveat, of course, is that one wants to use Intel network adapters (highly likely) and a LSI SAS 2008 based SAS controller. If this is the case, then the price of the motherboard is, in fact, less than the cost of the discrete components. Compared to adding these components to a consumer level motherboard, this solution presents a clear cost savings. With the exception of those users running FreeBSD versions prior to release 9-Current, the value of having all of the KVM-over-IP and IPMI 2.0 features is priceless.
Supermicro offers a compelling platform for anyone using an operating system to manage storage pools and redundancy the X8SI6-F is a tremendous value. While some may consider a $300 motherboard to be “expensive,” the integrated components effectively cost more separate than the entire motherboard. What the X8SI6-F does deliver on it the ability to attach a very large number of drives at a very low cost. Unless one is looking for a hardware RAID 6 solution, the X8SI6-F is perhaps a category killing product for LGA 1156 based storage servers.


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5 Fictional Same-Sex Couples Great for Comparing to Your Real-Life Romance
When it comes to love, you’ll sometimes hear gay guys compare their romances to Romeo and Juliet or some other fantastical straight couple, because not many gay couples exist in literature. It’s true; a combination of homophobia, heterocentrism and anti-obscenity laws have long kept same-sex romances from appearing on the written page, which is why we felt inspired to research five fictional same-sex couples to compare your real-life romance to. Not all of them have happy endings, but hey, neither did Romeo and Juliet.
1. Michael Tolliver and Ben McKenna from Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (2007)
Eighteen years after Maupin published the sixth installment of his beloved Tales of the City series, he published a seventh book which, unlike the previous ones, featured first-person narration from 55-year-old gardener Michael Tolliver (a thinly veiled version of the author). In the book, the HIV-positive character starts a relationship with Ben McKenna, an HIV-negative “humpy 33-year-old furniture maker” who is, according to The Guardian, “impossibly devoted, endlessly good-humoured, drop-dead gorgeous.”
After meeting on a website, the two get married, deal with the challenges of age-difference and eventually have a torrid threesome with Tolliver’s hairdresser. While the book got mostly warm reviews, many readers knew that the couple merely mirrored Maupin’s real-life relationship with Chris Turner, a man 30 years his junior.
2. David and Giovanni from James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956)
While the couple in James Baldwin’s novel is deeply tragic and dysfunctional, they’re also incredibly romantic in all the best and worst ways. Giovanni is a hunky Italian bartender who works at a Parisian gay bar; one night he meets David, a charmingly but painfully closeted American who has come to Paris to find himself. The two hit it off and start fucking and living in Giovanni’s room (a room without curtains that works as a metaphor for their secret passion and David’s closeted life).
David ends up royally screwing everything up as he leaves Giovanni to be wth his fiancee Hella. When he finds out that Giovanni will be executed for murdering his employer, David gets so depressed that he goes out and fucks some random sailor; Hella discovers him mid-coitus and leaves his two-timing ass. While David’s deluded self-loathing seems tiresome in our modern age, his love for Giovanni shines through even if he doesn’t want it to.
3. Sammy Klayman and Tracy Bacon from Michael Chabot’s The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000)
Tucked into Chabot’s 639-page World War II-era novel is Sammy Klayman (aka Sam Clay), the lead writer behind an anti-fascist Batman-esque comic book superhero called The Escapist, and Tracy Bacon, a handsome actor who voices The Escapist on the radio. When Tracy gets hired to play in the film adaptation of The Escapist, the two move to Hollywood and begin a life together.
Sadly, their romance gets cut short when the FBI and local police raid a private dinner they attend with other gay couples at a friend’s beach house. While Clay evades arrest, he also gets sexually abused by FBI agents and decides that he can’t live with Bacon under the constant threat of anti-gay harassment. Clay ends up playing straight with his cousin’s estranged wife, that is, until Clay gets publicly outed as a homosexual. While the romance isn’t too cheery, it does reflect the homophobia that plagued America during and after WWII.
4. Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar from Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain (1997)
You knew we had to include this couple, especially since Taiwanese-born film director Ang Lee immortalized them in an award-winning 2005 film adaptation of the same name. Twist and del Mar are Wyoming cowboys who meet and fall in love while working as sheepherders on Brokeback Mountain.
They part ways and marry women, occasionally meeting for trysts over the next 20 years. You can tell that they actually want to be together, but del Mar can’t bring himself to do it. Their unrequited passion culminates in a heartbreaking scene where, Twist utters, “I can’t make it on a coupla high-altitude fucks once or twice a year! You are too much for me Ennis, you sonofawhoreson bitch! I wish I knew how to quit you.”
The story ends tragically with Twist dying in a gay-bashing and del Mar sniffing his shirt and weeping, thinking of the life they could have had together, but it provides a hard-bitten lesson for anyone running from love. Also, if you loved the film, you should read Proulx’s short story—it’s available in a small 58-page version and has a lush lyricism and elegiac tone that Lee’s film could only hint at.
5. Maurice Hall and Alex Scudder from E.M. Forster’s Maurice (1971)
You’ll be happy to know that of all the horribly depressing same-sex romances in this list, this one actually has a happy ending. Maurice (which is actually pronounced “Morris”) is a gay stockbroker living in London’s East End, but he doesn’t really want to be gay. After visiting a hypnotist to cure himself of “congenital homosexuality”, he realizes you can’t cure the gay and then goes off to stay with his ex-boyfriend’s family. There he meets Alec Scudder, a young lower-class under-gamekeeper who picks up on Hall’s longing gay desire and literally climbs into Hall’s bedroom for some nook-nook.
In a dramatic twist, Hall freaks out and Scudder counter-freaks out and threatens to blackmail Hall, but when the two meet later on to discuss the details, it’s obvious that they both still want each other. So they knock boots and Scudder invites Hall to give up his financial success and social standing to move with him to Argentina. After initially declining, the two miraculously find each at a nearby boathouse and pledge that they “shan’t be parted no more”. Ahhhh, romance!
Even though Maurice was published a year after Forster’s death, he originally wrote it sometime around 1913 or 1914, he revised in 1932 and then revised it again near the start of 1960.

domain: entertainment


Originally Posted by Chowser
We've been using the Blackhawk Storm single point sling. $20. Seems decent enough to last. Don't know why we are a single point department. Guess last range master decided that when we got rifles. For simplicity, I built all my lowers set up for single point as well so that my training doesn't get mixed up.
I hear you. That is why I prefer my personal pump action shotguns to have ghost rings.
Glock 17, 19, 20SF, 21C, 22, 26, 27, Glock E-Tool, Glock knife
Quod ego haereticus appellari sequere Jesum.


As you may already know, here at Hog Roast Dorchester we don’t just provide great hog roast catering services, we also design, manufacture, service and sell our own market-leading catering equipment from our workshop based in northwest England. We wanted to take this opportunity to let you know about the range of fully refurbished hog roast machines that we currently have available.
Boasting an incredibly durable and robust design and constructed of the highest spec stainless steel and the most advanced hog roast machine components, our hog roast machines are built to last and will never let you down. This is why purchasing a second-hand hog roast machine from us is such a great idea. As well as saving you the cost of buying one that is brand new, you have the assurance that any used equipment you buy from us will still be in perfect working order.
Every used machine that comes through our workshop is scrupulously examined, meticulously reconditioned, fully serviced and deep cleaned by hog roast machine technicians prior to resale. So, if you are buying a used hog roast machine from us, you can feel completely confident that everything will be fully functional and as good as new. All of our used hog roast machines come with a 12-month warranty, 12-month gas check and a full service for your peace of mind.
Whether you have owned a hog roast machine in the past or this is a new venture for you, we will give you all of the technical specifications and practical know-how required to get the most out of your piece of kit, and if you do have any questions after you have purchased it, we are always here to answer your queries and give you some top tips on producing perfectly cooked pork every time.
If you are thinking about buying a second-hand hog roast machine, please don’t delay in getting in touch with us here at Hog Roast Dorchester to let us know your requirements and to see what we have available, as our used machines are such great value for money that they don’t hang around for long!


Genie GS4390 RT Hire
14.75m rough terrain diesel scissor lift
The Genie GS4392 RT is a diesel scissor lift suitable for rough terrain. It has rugged, foam-filled tyres, four-wheel drive with brakes, positive traction control, and auto-levelling outriggers. The GS4392 is ideal for high up, long-duration jobs on construction sites and challenging work fields.
This MEWP is suitable for all industries, including electrical, HVAC, plumbing, cleaning, finishing, maintenance, inspection, surveying, and more. It has a large deck with a 1.52m slide-out extension and a huge safe working limit of 680kg. With this capacity, the Genie GS4390 provides plenty of working space for up to seven workers plus their tools and equipment.
There are plenty of safety features to prevent falls from heights and accidents. For example, a fold-down hinged railing system has half-height spring-hinged gates on both sides. The lift also has a tilt level sensor, tilt alarm with drive and lift cut-out, motion alarm, flashing lights, and more.
To hire a scissor lift, you will need to provide a £500 deposit and submit two forms of ID. We will contact you for both once you have completed your online booking.
- 12.75m Platform Height.
- 14.75m Working Height.
- 680kg Safe Working Limit.
- Foam-Filled, Rough-Terrain Tyres.
Max Working Height: 48ft 4in | 14.75m
Capacity: 1,500lb | 680kg
Machine Width: 7ft 6in | 2.29m
Machine Length: 17ft 9in | 5.40m
Weight: 12,894lb | 5,849kg
Please note: This product description and detail is based on the model we have the most stock of. Alternative brands of equivalent specification may be supplied based on location and availability.


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long walks through forests in Saxony.
The Magic Forest and Reflections collection is dedicated to the beautiful forests in Saxony (Germany). It is inspired by long hikes, trees and their strong roots but also by abstract reflections in calm water. When walking through the woods, the interplay of light and shadow is fascinating. I also like to observe the seasonal changes in nature. The emergence, existence and fading of life that seems to be in a permanent cycle. In my opinion, trees symbolise the annual changes in nature, but also stability and peace. They grow in one place over a long period of time while the world around them changes very quickly.
Clear air, subtle sunlight, the soft rustling of leaves in the treetops, noises in the undergrowth, the aromatic scent of the ground. There is so much beauty around us every day. It depends on us whether we see and feel it. For me, the forest is a place of contemplation and serenity. Photography is a wonderful way for me to capture my impressions and the magic of the moment. With my photos and the stories surrounding them, I would like to inspire and motivate people to spend more time in nature and to experience it more consciously with all their senses.
Let my work bring the magic of the forest into your home. A selection of my photographs is available as prints in various sizes and on different materials. Please follow the links:


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The Block Media and the Busan-based thinktank will hold today a conference on the future of the blockchain industry and the port city’s vision for Korea’s first blockchain hub.
The seminar, to be held at a National Assembly hall, will feature Busan’s blueprint to make the city a blockchain hub.
Experts will provide policy suggestions for the port’s blockchain hub.
Early this year, Busan got authorization to establish a regulation-free blockchain district. The port city will foster finance, logistics, and IT through blockchain platforms.

domain: finance


text:
condition: excellent make / manufacturer: Yamaha model name / number: U1 size / dimensions: 60"x24"x47"
QR Code Link to This Post
Yamaha U1 Upright Piano and bench reduced price.. Previously owned, made in 1973. Excellent condition. Recently tuned to A440 pitch and ready to add to your musical enjoyment. Please contact first to make an appointment to see and play it. Please bring your music teacher or piano tuner to inspect it.
Thanks for looking.
do NOT contact me with unsolicited services or offers


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Allison DuBois, the medium who famously predicted the demise of Kyle Richards’ relationship with Mauricio Umansky, feels vindicated.
After Page Six confirmed on Monday that the “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” star and her real estate tycoon husband were splitting up after 27 years of marriage, DuBois took to her Instagram for a little “I told you so” moment.
“I don’t wish Kyle ill. I hope she finds what she’s looking for,” the New York Times bestselling author captioned an episodic of her brief yet impactful cameo on Season 1 of the Bravo reality show. “I guess I’m the only one who ‘saw’ this coming.”
“People kept telling me I was picking up on Camille [Grammer]’s divorce, NOT Kyle,” DuBois continued, urging all the “arm chair psychics” out there to “sit down.”
She appropriately concluded her shady post with: “Mic drop.”
During the 2010 “Dinner Party From Hell” episode, the red-headed psychic puffed on an e-cigarette and sipped on a massive martini as she nonchalantly informed a skeptical Richards — in front of all her co-stars — that her marriage was doomed.
“Have you been married twice?” DuBois asked at the time, to which the actress replied, “Uh-huh.”
“Well then that’s the last one you have. I guess that’s good news!” the “Dead Life” podcast host added with a laugh as she explained to group, “I was thinking she was gonna have to get married again, meaning you’d have a divorce.”
For more Page Six reality TV updates
Richards, 54, was married to her first husband, Guraish Aldjufrie, from 1988 to 1992. Together, they had one child: daughter Farrah, 34.
The longtime Bravolebrity then tied the knot with Umansky, 53, in January 1996. The pair went on to welcome daughters Alexia, 27, Sophia, 23, and Portia, 15.
“If my husband ever leaves me, I’m going with him,” a visibly annoyed Richards told DuBois during the uncomfortable supper, prompting the medium to deliver the historic line: “He will never emotionally fulfill you. Ever. Know that.“
DuBois made sure to clarify that she was referring to “this one,” as in Umansky.
“But you will stay with him, and he will take care of you,” the medium predicted. “And as soon as the kids are bigger, you’ll have nothing in common.”
In the same breath, DuBois encouraged Richards to “put the walls down for the females coming into your life,” which could have foreshadowed the reality star’s recent and highly suspicious relationship with country music singer Morgan Wade.
Though DuBois insists she’s not happy about Richards and Umanksy’s failed union, she’s certainly reveling in having been right.
“I did say when their kids were grown,” she pointed out to Page Six exclusively. “Hopefully, they both find happiness through this difficult time. Kyle has a way of landing on her feet. Maybe she’ll finally give vaping a try.”
#Medium #predicted #Kyle #Mauricio #divorce #feels #vindicated

domain: celebrity


text:
September 15, 2015
Dear Members and Coworkers,
By now you’ve seen the throngs of young men flooding into Europe. Refugees? Really? Why are between 70 and 80% of them between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one? Cameras always try to focus on the women and children, but there are precious few amid the sea of swarthy males. Late word is that Germany, initially guilt ridden and welcoming due to some recent attacks against “refugee centers,” has realized that there are far more than can be accommodated and supported. They’ve shut down rail services that were bringing trainloads of them into Germany. Now they’ll back up into Austria and Hungary where we’ll undoubtedly be seeing more images illustrating “humanitarian crises.”
But the UN, the pope and U.S. president know what to do. They’ll be getting them onto our shores one way or the other, and won’t even tell us how many have come or where they’ve parked them. Yes, we’ve heard about the ten thousand the president wants to expedite into the U.S. But as the pope has said, this is just the tip of the iceberg. The be-robed little communist blames this invasion of Muslims into the Israelite nations of Europe and the United States on the “god of money.” There must be plenty of greedy brokers and traders who get rich at the expense of the “little guy.” Con men, Ponzi scheme operators and internet thieves are a dime a dozen. But how in the world does the invasion of Muslims into western societies attribute to the “god of money”?
We’re being set up. The pope knows that the rest of the world has followed the lead of the United States, printing un-backed currency to boost economic activity. History shows us that this leads ultimately to disaster. What happens when the world’s currencies no longer have value or confidence? Is that when he’ll unveil some new currency, perhaps electronic, perhaps backed by gold, which will require reverence to the Vatican, open borders policies and “saving the planet” from global warming? If this twerp isn’t the False Prophet, he must certainly be his fairy godfather. He may well promote himself as the soon coming “god of money,” and “god” of everything else to assist in the destruction of capitalism.
You’re aware that interest rates have been held at near zero for years now. Finally, the Fed is beginning to seriously discuss raising them somewhat in an effort to stem the explosive growth of national debt. But dire warnings are coming from all directions, most notably from Europe, that a rise in U.S. interest rates will mean a worldwide financial collapse. You’ve seen wild market volatility in recent weeks, and devastating losses in the Asian markets due to China’s “devaluation” policies, which in effect is flooding its own economy with devalued currency.
Who in the world still respects or fears the United States? NOBODY. Not China, not Russia, not North Korea, not Iran, not Europe, and in the case of respect, not even Israel. The American military has been gutted of knowledgeable, experienced commanders. “Yes men,” and a bunch of “gay” and lesbian officers have replaced them. The top priority of the American military has become social experimentation, and gay, lesbian and trans-gender promotion. The Bible has become virtual contraband, even for the Chaplains.
Obama has shown the world his own limp wrist, and the message is loud and clear. The United States and its allies, with the possible exception of Israel, no longer represent morality and will not respond to even the most extreme of provocations. Those provocations are now coming from all directions, with not so much as an acknowledgement let alone a response.
North Korea has engaged in exchanges of fire and shelling across the DMZ with South Korea where thirty odd thousand U.S. troops remain deployed. The crazed little dwarf with perhaps the world’s worst haircut has just put the world on notice that they have full ICBM capability and are ready to strike the United States in the event of hostilities.
China has stationed warships offshore Alaska. Russia routinely violates sovereign airspace around the U.S., and that of Great Britain and northern European nations. Iran threatens the United States and Israel almost daily, even as the U.S. president and his constituents in Congress force through the nuclear “deal” that is adamantly opposed by a vast majority of Americans. Now North Korea threatens to “nuke” the United States and has the where-with-all to carry it out. Many may have forgotten that North Korea participated in the same UN sponsored dog and pony show with the IAEA, inspections, limitations and so forth, that Iran just signed up for. How many unhinged lunatics get to field an arsenal of nuclear weapons atop intercontinental ballistic missiles before they can either blackmail the west into submission or hit major targets with unimaginable devastation and loss of life?
Not since the darkest days of the Cold War, or the Cuban missile crisis, have we seen a more dangerous set of circumstances worldwide. We have a president who seems to be on everybody’s side but the American people, and the powerful agencies he controls are hard at work to alter the very definition of who the American people are.
They’ve crammed ignorant, diseased criminals into our midst. Now Muslims, potential terrorists, are going to continue crowding in. We’re supposed to make them all “equal” with those who’ve worked all their lives to make a home and support their families, welcome their heathen beliefs and practices into our midst. If not, we must be a nation of bigots. The one admitted socialist candidate for the presidency says that America was racist in its founding. The United States is getting what the president, the pope and the UN believes it deserves. A healthy dose of “black liberation theology,” “social justice,” homosexual dominance, abortion on demand (even for full-term babies), turning the most heinous of sins into politically correct righteousness, and Godly beliefs and practices into hateful bigotry.
Most people still don’t understand. All the blessings of freedom and prosperity enjoyed by western nations and the United States came from obedience and worship of the one true Creator God, not the result of “unfairness” or some accident of history. We come from the lineage of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, whose name was changed to Israel. Modern day Israel should more accurately be called Judah. That might have made it simpler to grasp that there are still eleven other tribes of Israel unaccounted for. Twelve actually, if you account for Joseph’s sons of Ephraim and Manasseh, they having received the special blessing and “birthright” from their grandfather Jacob.
But that truth has been lost. It’s actually considered “Christian identity” religion and branded as “racist” even by Protestants. The pope has already rounded up most of the prominent Protestant leaders in the United States. They’ve already acquiesced to the “gay-Christian” theme. They already hold the primary Catholic doctrines as faith, such as the “trinity,” Christmas, Easter, Sunday, etc. You think an anti-American, anti-God president has overrun us? Wait ’till you see what the pope is about to do when “his Phoniness” takes America by storm! God’s warnings to Israel apply to northern Europe, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and have already been visited upon South Africa. We’re all finding out He meant what He said.
If we, and our peoples don’t get a clue, repent of our personal and national sins but quick, we’ll be overrun by our enemies, destroyed in our economy, and living the way the heathen were before they got here. Not only that, but the Vatican will be in control of all finance and demand that the pope be regarded as God’s authority on earth, probably in the wake of some unimaginable devastation. Rather than worrying about what we’ll do then, maybe we should consider what we’ll do NOW.
P.S. This letter comes early due to the upcoming Feast of Tabernacles beginning September 28. An additional HDO envelope has been included for the Day of Atonement, Wednesday, September 23.

domain: news


text:
The Red Cross Book (RCB) is the unofficial name of a Japanese pamphlet that was sold in theaters to viewers who came to see The End of Evangelion. The book is printed on A-4 sized paper, with the cover consisting of a red Georgian cross over a black background and the film's title printed on it.
The book is essentially a canon glossary, authored by Gainax and various members of both the Evangelion TV series and film staff, of many of the terms used in the TV series, manga, and the two films to introduce The End of Evangelion's background to unfamiliar audiences. Also included are an interview with deputy director Kazuya Tsurumaki, a listing of seiyū and brief essays written by them on their respective characters, short biographical sketches, commentary on the TV series and production of the movies, and a "Notes" section covering the setting of the movies.
A translation was made from the original scans of the book. Blank white pages are omitted.

domain: library


text:
Walt Disney's It's a Small World of Fun, Vol. 1 Trailer (2006)
"Animated adventures in exciting lands!"16 May 200655 mins
You'll discover that it truly is a small world after all as you travel around the globe with this sensational animated collection. Follow a host of lovable Disney characters as they star in magical adventures from all across the world. Sit back and laugh as you enjoy these unforgettable stories, including the hilarious exploits of "The Flying Gauchito," from South America, and watch as a young boy learns to make the heavens shine in Japan's "Grievance Of A Starmaker." Join Mickey, Goofy, Pluto, and more of their friends from around the world in a wonderful collection of tales your whole family will adore!
FBI agent Malcolm Turner goes back undercover as Big Momma, a slick-talking, slam-dunking Southern granny with attitude to spare! Now this granny must play nanny to three dysfunctional upper class kids in order to spy on their computer hacked dad.
Lightning McQueen, a hotshot rookie race car driven to succeed, discovers that life is about the journey, not the finish line, when he finds himself unexpectedly detoured in the sleepy Route 66 town of Radiator Springs.
During a trip to Germany to scatter their grandfather's ashes, German-American brothers Todd and Jan discover Beerfest, the secret Olympics of downing stout, and want to enter the contest to defend their family's beer-guzzling honor.


Pep Guardiola insists Manchester City haven’t earned the right to be compared with Barcelona and warned his players they are a red card away from Champions League disaster.
City are almost certain to reach the quarter-finals of this season’s competition as they lead Basle 4-0 going into Wednesday night’s second leg at the Etihad.
But Guardiola tempered expectations that the runaway Premier League leaders are also favourites to land Europe’s top prize as he played down comparisons with his old club.
Pep Guardiola insists his side have not earned the right to be compared with Barcelona
The Spaniard, who won the European Cup three times as a coach and player at the Nou Camp, believes City cannot have such lofty aspirations when they have only lifted the Carabao Cup under him.
‘That team dominated for the last decade, and have 15-20 years with different managers and different players,’ said Guardiola. ‘We won just the first title. To join this kind of team you have to be there a long time.
‘It is a completely different players. They won a lot in the past. We are new. We won one title but it is not comparing. It is not good for us comparing with one team.
‘We are almost in the quarter-finals, we are almost champions of the Premier League. But we are not in the quarter-finals, we are not champions, that is why we have to be calm.
‘That is the best advice I can give to my players. Tomorrow, it would be just the second time in our whole history in the quarter-finals of the Champions League. We don’t have legacy behind us.’
Although overcoming Basle is all but guaranteed, Guardiola has enough experience of the fine margins at this level to avoid complacency in the latter stages of the Champions League.
He pointed to Fabian Delph’s red card in the shock FA Cup defeat at Wigan and Oleksandar Zinchenko’s good fortune in only receiving a yellow card for his challenge on Victor Moses in the 1-0 win over Chelsea on Sunday as examples of incidents that could prove very costly in Europe.
He added: ‘If people say we are favourites it is because maybe so far we have done really good. But Wigan play good for 44 minutes, one action, the red card.
‘Zinchenko on Moses, and orange card – could be yellow, could be red. If it is red you are out of the Champions League.
‘Madrid before the first game against PSG – “Oh, Madrid is not good, not playing well”. They won 3-1. It is a different competition.’
‘Always it is time to learn. In the Champions League it is so important how to handle the bad moments and the good moments – how you concede, how you create. Tomorrow, I would like to see a team where we don’t concede, we have control, we don’t concede set-pieces, don’t concede from counter-attacks. It is a good moment to see when we are 1-0, 2-1, how we handle the situation.
‘We start again from zero. But we have to be focused to not make a mistake, just to be focused on what we have to do and control the game and go through. That is the target. A Champions League game is something special and you have to be focused. In football everything can happen – a red card, they can score one or two goals.’
Guardiola will wear his yellow ribbon on the touchline against Basle because it is allowed under UEFA rules, having accepted an FA charge for displaying a political symbol.
However, FA chief executive Martin Glenn has been forced to apologise after discussing the issue and comparing the Star of David to the Nazi swastika.
Guardiola believes that Glenn did not understand that the ribbon is a show of support for four jailed politicians and not for Catalan independence as a whole.
‘Mr Glenn has apologised so okay,’ said Guardiola. ‘But the first impression when I hear that is because he didn’t understand what the yellow ribbon means. It is simple like that.
‘He make a comment that is far away. It is not about independence or not independence. It is about four people who are in jail when they didn’t do anything to be in jail. It is simple. I think now he will understand because he didn’t understand the reality of the situation.
‘Many times I speak for myself and after I regret what I said, but I am sure now that is not going to happen.
‘There are the FA rules. They have them and they apply them. I accept the decision because I have to. That doesn’t mean they are right or wrong. It doesn’t mean I agree or don’t agree. I said from the beginning, if the FA said I shouldn’t wear the ribbon, I accept it. The yellow ribbon is always going to be there. There are still people in prison in an unfair way.’
City’s director of football Txiki Begiristain met with referees’ chief Mike Riley at the CFA on Tuesday morning after the club raised concerns over some of the tackles on their players in recent months.
But Guardiola was not at the meeting but insisted that the issue affects all Premier League teams and not just City.
He said: ‘I didn’t know Mike Riley was here and I don’t know which issues they talk about. When I spoke about the tackles, it is not about Manchester City players, it is about football. I accept the physicality here in England. It is not Manchester City, it is football.’


text:
Up this week:
GRIS (various, 2018-2020) – in a game quite like no other, we take an evocative trip through the manifestations of painful emotions as experienced by a girl names Gris.
Yoshi’s Island (SNES, 1995) – it’s up to Yoshi to reunite two young, and famous, brothers in this classic and stylish 1990s platformer.
Super Mario World (SNES, 1990) – join as we play through this classic game where Mario must save Princess Toadstool and Dinosaur Land from Bowser’s clutches! [FINAL]
Nostalgic Notions (multiple consoles) – our periodic feature showcasing various classic and retro titles.

domain: game


text:
NEW ORLEANS — Former Tulane shortstop Josh Prince is becoming a jack of all trades with the Nashville Sounds.
That sometimes can indicate a master of none, but Prince will take it, because that’s looking like his ticket to Major League Baseball.
“It’s been crazy, it’s been hectic,” said Prince, describing his first year in Triple-A baseball. “A lot of ups and downs, a lot of unknowns of where I’m going to be tomorrow, what am I going to be doing, what do they want me to do.
“But it’s been an exciting time.”
Prince was called up to the parent Milwaukee Brewers on the second day of the season and stayed up there for a month. He was used mostly as a pinch-runner and defensive replacement, though, and had just five at-bats, getting one hit.
Still, it was invaluable to get that taste. He learned a lot.
“It was quite an experience,” he said. “When I went up, of course, I didn’t know if I was going to be up there two days, a week, 15 days. They told me to keep playing hard and do what I do. I tried to show them I could help the team win.
“Watching those guys, I tried to pick their brains as much as possible about their approach to hitting and playing the field and how to make your body feel as good as possible while you’re trying to play every day.”
Last Wednesday, three days before the Sounds were to begin their series against the Zephyrs in New Orleans, Prince was called back up to the Brewers, while right fielder Norichika Aoki took a short leave to be with his wife, who had a baby. Prince played two games with Milwaukee, getting a start, but went 0-for-3.
He came back to the Sounds in time for the start of the series Saturday against the Zephyrs, and on Sunday hit a home run to left field leading off the fifth that gave Nashville a 1-0 lead.
“It was good to get one,” he said.
Although the Zephyrs still won, 2-1, Prince had owed them one. He was on a six-game hitting streak that ended when the Z’s came to town on June 14. He had been struggling ever since.
Prince his hitting just .243 with the Sounds, but Brewers General Manager Doug Melvin and Manager Ron Roenicke don’t seem too concerned. As evidenced by the call-ups, Prince is in their plans, which is to make him a super utility man.
Prince, who is on the 40-man roster, said learning all those positions isn’t the reason he isn’t hitter better, and that he just has to put in the work, which does take a lot of time. On Saturday morning, he was seen in the batting cage at Zephyr Stadium getting his swings.
Sounds manager Mike Guerrero said the Brewers know that Prince’s hitting will come around.
“He’s in his first year of Triple-A baseball, and it’s a tough league with some very good pitchers,” Guerrero said.
The Brewers switched Prince to center field last year at AA Huntsville, then really moved him around in spring training this year with the big team.
“That’s when I played left (field), center, right, shortstop, third (base) to try to make me into a utility fielder,” he said.
A shortstop and pitcher before, he said switching to center field was a big adjustment. One thing that has helped, he said, is that he played other sports growing up. At Barbe High School in Lake Charles, for instance, he played defensive back and wide receiver.
“As a defensive back, it’s very similar to center field, of following the ball, taking a route, knowing where the ball is going to be before it gets there,” he said.
Prince relishes having played on the Barbe team that won a state championship his senior year in 2006 and finished sixth in the nation. He signed with Texas and played in 39 of the Longhorn’s 51 games as a freshman, but decided to transfer to Tulane.
“Texas just wasn’t a good fit,” he said.
Being with the Green Wave was. His last year there, in 2009, Tulane reached the Tallahassee Regional, where it beat Florida and Bucknell before losing to Florida State and catcher Buster Posey.
“Josh had two really good years with us,” said Wave coach Rick Jones. “He is a shortstop with outstanding range and good hands, and he developed into a hitter who put pressure on the defense. He stole 52 bases his junior year.
“The reason the Brewers can move him to all those positions is that he’s such a good athlete.”
Prince was drafted in the third round by Milwaukee in ’09. Two Tulane teammates are in the big leagues. Pitcher Aaron Loup is in his second year with the Toronto Blue Jays, and left-hander Preston Claiborne, Prince’s roommate in college, is in his first year with the New York Yankees.
Prince said that doesn’t put any pressure on him to get to the bigs.
“Having been there already does,” he said. “Can’t wait to get back, and stay.”
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text: The present study was conducted to determine egg and larval parasitoids of the beet armyworm Spodoptera exigua Hubner (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae), which is an important but sporadic pest in Turkey. High beet armyworm population levels were recently observed in fields of first and second crop maize in the southeast Mediterranean region of Turkey. The parasitoid species complex and its impact on the pest were analyzed in a 4-year study in first and second crop maize. The braconid larval parasitoids Microplitis rufiventris Kokujev, M. tuberculifer Wesmael, Meteorus ictericus Nees, Chelonus obscuratus (Herrich Schaffer) (an egg-larval parasitoid), Apanteles ruficrus (Haliday); the ichneumonid larval parasitoids Hyposoter didyniator (Thunberg) and Sinophorus xanthostomus Gravenhorst; and the egg parasitoid Trichogramma evanescens (Westwood) were found to be the natural enemies attacking the pest. Among the parasitoid species the solitary endoparasitoid H. didymator was the most prevalent species, being reared from 40.5% of the parasitized larvae found. Higher parasitism rates were recorded on first crop than on second crop maize in every year. Possible reasons for this difference in larval parasitism between two growing seasons include lower population of the pest and reduced insecticide applications in first crop maize fields which permitted higher parasitism. However, parasitoid activity was insufficient to counterbalance the population growth of the pest on subsequent second crop maize.

domain: literature