Solar storm arrives, nobody notices If you notice the complete absence of global catastrophe, it’s because the solar storm that arrived after this week’s series of eruptions from the Sun only struck the Earth a glancing blow. Now, as people are noticing that the power grid didn’t collapse, computers didn’t fail worldwide, and GPS still worked (as well as it ever …
If it makes you feel better, I've been living in Finland (65 degrees north) for over 2 years and have seen eff all for that time. When the sun is active it is cloudy, when it is not cloudy it is a full moon, when it is not a full moon it is sodding midnight sun.
Thanks to this we all know that Solar Storms are a myth concocted by Al Gore and Astrophysics in order to line their own pockets. There is no such thing as Solar Weather, except the kind that makes it sunny when there's no clouds. Furthermore, there are no mentions of solar events in the bible, so they clearly must be a load of baloney.
For once I actually chatted with the Witnesses that knocked yesterday.
They told me that there were 'signs' of the end.
I guess that seeing Mars is one of them. I told them that 'the end of the world' comes every few weeks, but it just depends on which fairy story you paid heed to.
"It's in the bible" 'which version?'
"It is written" 'By whom?'
"God" 'Which one?'
"There is only one" 'Really, tell that to the pantheistic religions'
"There are more eathquakes than ever before" ' Nope, there is better recording than ever before'
Is it the sunspots that bring them out?
I just got some Northern lights here in Canada, (appx around 45° 54' N) Only got a brief glimpse and not long enough to get my camera as the clouds rolled back in.
Usually with all the dire warnings and such I take them with a grain of salt, I think there was only 1 time I can recall having actual issues and that was with RF gear and degraded range. I was not in Quebec when the nasty stuff happened. But you try and explain to people how and why the systems can act up due to these, to most people, you may as well piss in the wind.
checking http://www.gooddx.net/auroralog.htm (near real-time contact list from a bearded very high frequency sensor network system) would indicate that the 9th March event is a "Scotland to Lerwick" or "Russia to Finland" plasma density event. Not yet as interesting as the 22nd January 2012 or that time ('89?) in Alpha-November square with the landy and the quad Tonna's when we started working Italians by aurora.
The sun rotates, and the same AR1429 region responsible for CME will be back pointing at us in around twenty-seven days, so tin-hats can be folded neatly and stored for next time!
"G4 pah"
eh? Down-voted for being qualified and experienced enough to now enjoy my 4th solar maximum.
In my day we had to sit the full written exam - not some sissy multiple choice paper, and we had to pass 12wpm (actually, I topped out at 42wpm in my marine radio days, but that's another story).
Have a great weekend shouting into your mic: I'll stick to CW and have much more fun.
SUN Microsystems ( remember them ) gave me the same baloney about my Enterprise 3500 cluster back in 2001/2 spontaneously rebooting due to 'Stray Neutrinos' as it couldn't possibly have been a hardware fault. I've kept that explanation in my back pocket for the last decade waiting for a suitable time to re-use it. Still waiting.
Not as crazy as you think. Errors due to memory bits being flipped by background radiation are common, and that's why ECC is used. Cosmic ray cascades account for a big part of the background and neutrons - rather than neutrinos - are part of this.
Your Sun E3500 problem was due to a lack of ECC protection in the SPARC SRAM cache array; previous versions had been small enough that such cosmic ray hits were fairly unlikely, but the newer generation of caches was large enough for the impact to become significant.
The issue was further complicated by the susceptibility varying among different SRAM manufacturers and according to other environmental factors. Subsequent versions were made with mirrored caches or ECC, and today ECC is pervasive in enterprise-class servers.
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