Posts by Art Slartibartfast

Doomed UK smartphone maker Bullitt Group finally liquidated

My CAT 62 is in a drawer somewhere for when I occasionally need thermal imaging through its FLIR camera. Can't have it for regular use because there are no security patches for it. Such a shame, because otherwise it is still in perfect working condition.

Starting June 20, the support regulations for tablets and smartphones are more strict in the EU (eco-design rules):

- five years of software updates

- seven years of spare parts availability

- 80% battery capacity left after 800 charging cycles

- labeling of energy efficiency and repairability

These rules apply to devices newly introduced to the market, but are somewhat counterproductive in situations such as company liquidations.

Floppy disks and paper strips lurk behind US air traffic control

Re: You're safer with paper.

Ground movement control systems are not commissioned overnight. National regulators require a safety case in which all possible aspects of a system's operation are considered, including operating procedures, environment, traffic patterns, human interaction and failure modes. The system only goes into operational use if the remaining risk is acceptable to the regulator. Back in 1998 the Internationbal Civil Aviation Authority (ICAO) deemed A-SMGCS just as good as looking at traffic out the window, that is the level of sophistications these systems attained already back then.

A typical required reliability figure would be 99.995% uptime. To properly monitor all ground traffic, aircraft and vehicles, there is often multiple coverage by radar, multilateration and ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast).

The systems are designed for high availability with redundant hardware spread over at least two locations and duplicated data links with physically separate pathways. The design allows for graceful degradation so that if central processing fails, the radar image is still available.

Runway access is controlled by stop bars, often with microwave barriers that will detect runway incursions. If a stop bar is off, that does not mean that a crossing is safe, but if it is on, the pilot knows it is not safe.

Moreover, Air Traffic Controllers are trained to deal with system failure. In that case, they switch to procedural air traffic control, doing everything in their heads with of course a much reduced traffic flow.

Re: You're safer with paper.

The thing with paper is that he information is only available to the person holding it. Twenty years ago at Copenhagen airport they would point camera's at the strip bays so that others who needed to know could see the clearance status of flights (the position in the bay indicates the clearance). If for example the departure sequence was changed, the order of the strips in the bay was rearranged. Any changes to the strip were made by crossing out the information and writing the new information next to it.

All of these changes were manual. With modern Electronic Flight Strips (EFS) all the information of who changed what and when is logged and available for analysis. Everybody who needs to know can see the electronic strips.

Unlike paper strips, electronic flight strips are presented in color, making information much easier to read. Arrivals and departures are much easier to tell apart.

There often is also a direct link to the traffic displays of the Advanced Surface Movement Guidance and Control System (A-SMGCS) so that the information labels of the aircraft are always in sync with the information shown in the strip. Information is kept in sync in both directions. For example, alerts are also made visible on strips in real-time for better situational awareness of the controllers.

Paper indeed does not need electricity, but any modern airport handling a take-off every 60 seconds cannot afford the inefficiencies of handling paper. By the way, usually after the flight has been handled, the strips are taken out of their holder and discarded in a special bin. At some airports the contents of this bin is taken to an administrative department where the information is manually entered in a database. Not efficient and the database is guaranteed to have errors. Overall, electronic flight strips are a big win.

Ukrainians smuggle drones hidden in cabins on trucks to strike Russian airfields

Unintended (?) consequences

According to many reports on-line, a side effect of the drone strike is that Russia now checks each and every truck coming into the country. Security theatre or not, this seriously disrupts their logistics.

How to stay on Windows 10 instead of installing Linux

It is not that I don't have the equipment to run Windows 11, I shelled that money out a few years ago after my previous PC of 2010 was getting too long in the tooth. The issue is that I have a peripheral that Windows 11 does not support, an HP Reverb G2 virtual reality set. All because the brilliant minds at Microsoft decided to cut the Windows Mixed Reality (WMR) support out of the OS, that VR set will become an expensive paperweight (unless I get it working under Linux with Monado).

Besides this, it is an awful waste of good hardware that still has years of life left in it. Same goes for mobile phones and tablets still in perfectly good condition, but need to be scrapped because there are no security updates anymore. This certainly does not do the environment a favor,

Please fasten your seatbelts. A third of US air traffic control systems are 'unsustainable'

Re: DEI

The only time DEI is an issue is when different standards apply because of a person's background, such as universities requiring different SAT scores to get in based on which group a student belongs to. This case went to the US Supreme Court where this policy was struck down.

As explained here DEI was and is a non-issue for air traffic safety. Yes, there was a preference for minorities in selecting candidates, but all of them had to go through the same rigorous training and evaluation and meet the same requirements.

For further reading

For those interested in details of this topic, the Reason Foundation provides interesting backgrounds to the state of the FAA and how they are stuck in pre-historic times. It is not just the infrastructure, but also the way they are organised.

How Google tracks Android device users before they've even opened an app

Can be uninstalled on Samsung S23

Thanks for the heads up. The App manager on my Samsung S23 allows me to remove it.

Here's the ugliest global-warming chart you'll ever need to see

Re: FWIW

Huh? I did not remove a post.

Re: Just another alarmist global warming rant

Finally, someone who takes the trouble to actually quote what they disagree with. Interesting link, I need to look at this in detail.

Re: Just another alarmist global warming rant

Wait, what... did you just assume my political affiliation? In the elections the US constituency was faced with two horrible candidates. For different reasons, but still horrible. Had the democrats put forward Dean Philips and he had won, the US, and the world for that matter, would be in much better shape today. I do not agree with Dean's opinion on climate, but he would easily have been a way better president.

Trump is not only a loose cannon, he is a one-man artillery battery firing barrage after barrage of destructive executive orders.

Re: Just another alarmist global warming rant

Good of you to check the actual references. There are two things I have a problem with here. First of all, they include RCP 8.5, an extreme scenario for the rise in carbon dioxide levels. It was originally intended as a test scenario to see what models do. Yet, in many publications it is treated as the most likely scenario because, well, it gets scary results.

Second issue is modelling. Even the researchers creating the models for CMIP 6 say they run too hot. The models are both numerically unstable and inaccurate. See for example this article, in which researchers varied the initial conditions by a trillionth of a degree (0.00000000001 °C) and got completely different outcomes running the models from 1920 to 2100.

Climate science has a long way to go before it can be used for policy making.

Re: Just another alarmist global warming rant

Lovely reference to the Yes, Minister! series. However, in my original post what I said was that the quality of many temperature measurement networks is shoddy. I did not claim there was no warming at all.

One of the problems with the concept of an average global temperature anomaly is that it tries to summarise the state of thirty generally recognised different climate types into a single number. An extreme in one direction can cancel out an extreme in the opposite direction. In that case the conclusion would be there are zero problems where in fact you have two.

Re: Just another alarmist global warming rant

For one thing Rik, as you probably well know, the effect of CO2 is logarithmic. That is why the effect is defined in terms of doubling CO2 levels. The effect diminishes with increasing concentration and most of the impact is behind us.

Cooking ourselves is a gross exaggeration. CO2 both heats and cools, but it is not the only game in town. Sea water never gets above 30 °C. You can observe that in the tropics where massive thunderstorms remove enourmous amounts of heat away from the lower atmosphere.

Anyway, appeal to authority does not convince me. What counts are facts and falsifiable hypothethes. What concerns me is that we are spending inordinate amounts of money on solutions that do not work on what is unjustly perceived as a problem, crippling our economy and the welfare of people. Dumb stuff such as carbon capture and storage. Expensive stuff that according to the calculation methods touted by the IPCC would have an impact too small to even measure. Bjorn Lomborg calculated using IPCC methods that if all countries in the world stuck to the Paris agreement from 2015 to 2100, the difference would be 0.17 °C at the cost of trillions of dollars. Sheer madness.

Re: Just another alarmist global warming rant

There is a strong correlation between ice cream sales in Australia and shark attacks. Does eating ice cream cause shark attacks? No of course not. Ice cream consumption and shark attacks mostly occur in the summer when people go to the beach. Correlation is not necessarily causation.

Re: Just another alarmist global warming rant

See for an example the article Melting Glaciers Revealing Ancient Tree Stumps from a Warmer Period that describes that a complete forest was covered by a glacier. The tree stumps found are confirmed to be over 3000 years old.

By the way, the glacier melting is not as bad as it sounds. For example, this article states: "This means that the uncertainty of the estimated volume of glacial ice, not the volume itself but the uncertainty of the volume, is five times the calculated change in the last 23 years."

Re: Just another alarmist global warming rant

So much for internal consistency of IPCC reports...

Re: FWIW

The point is that the Heartland Institute, which is a climate change skeptical organistaion, still referred to Christopher Monckton in a posting last December. If he has changed his position, it would have happened after that and it would be significant enough to show up on-line. I can find no such message. So the question is, where has he publicly said he has changed position? Or are we talking about a different person here?

Re: FWIW

"but eventually the evidence overwhelmed and he came to accept the scientific truth of it" [citation needed]

Re: Just another alarmist global warming rant

Well Steelpillow, with regards to glaciers melting, yes indeed many of them are melting. And what do they reveal? Tree stumps from the vegetation that used to grow there. The glaciers were not always there and we are coming out of a little ice age.

As far as predictions go, the media is rife with failed predictions.

But to consider the CO2 concentration to be the thermostat button for earth's temperature is an enormous stretch. Decades of climate research costing billions of dollars has failed to provide a definitive answer what the warming effect is of doubling CO2 concentrations. The equilibrium climate sensitivity or ECS, is likely in the range of 2 °C to 5 °C according to the IPCC. Likely, not definitively determined. Those two extremes a a factor 2.5 apart. At the same time they emphatically say that 30 other factors, including insolation, are insignificant. The climate modelers can't even get the clouds right and they themselves say that their models run too hot.

On the whole I do not disagree that earth's atmosphere is getting warmer. But I strongly disagree that it is a disaster that requires action. The global warming target is a political choice based on a flawed metric against an arbitrary baseline.

People focus on daily news instead of watching long term trends. Hot weather is all over the news where cold spells are hardly mentioned. According to a paper in The Lancet the mortality in India due to cold is seven times higher than mortality due to heat.

The climate narrative has plot holes wider than a beer truck. It is not that I fail to see as you put it, the facts simply do not convince.

Re: Just another alarmist global warming rant

Ok, so tell me, which part of what I wrote is factually wrong and why? Please quote the exact words you disagree with.

Just another alarmist global warming rant

The foundations of the whole global warming narrative are rotten to the core. Temperature is an intensive property. It is mathematically possible to average the numbers, but the result has no meaningful physical meaning. Case in point: if I have two equal volumes of dry air at a pressure of 1 bar, identical except for the temperature, where one volume is 20 °C and the other volume is 0 °C, and I let them mix isolated from all other influences, what would the resulting temperature be? Averaging the two temperatures results in a value of 10 °C, but as any qualified HVAC engineer can tell you, the actual result would be 9.65 °C, 0.35 °C less.

Why the difference? Mainly because air at 0 °C has 7.3% higher specific mass than a 20 °C. Another factor is that there are some small non-linearities in how enthalpy depends on temperature. Popularly said, cold air cools stuff down more than warm air heats them up. Averaging temperatures completely ignores this fact and therefore ends up to high. Never mind that air pressure and humidity also play a role in the warming and cooling effects of air and are ignored all together. Disagree with me? Show me one paper that takes these factors into account and comes to a definite conclusion.

And then we still have the matter of temperature measurements themselves. 77.9%, nearly 8 out of 10, of the meteorological stations the MET Office uses in the UK has an accuracy worse than 2 °C. And never mind that the MET Office publishes data from 103 stations that do not even exist. The situation is just as dire in the US where only 7.9% of the surface stations reach an accuracy of better than 1 °C and Australia where the Bureau of Meteorology has been repeatedly found to cook the books.

Even the IPCC does not see any climate influence in the past or the future on fire weather, or many other climate properties for that matter. See Table 12.12 on page 1856 in their latest report. You need to read past the Summary for Policy Makers of which the content is determined by subjective voting rather than by hard facts.

Climate science is a mess and unfit to guide policy.

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

Re: Couple of things that need to be set straight

Depends which ESET product you are looking at. Her is a release anouncement of last September for ESET Endpoint Antivirus for Linux 11.1.3.0. That page contains an end-of-life warning, but that only affects previous versions of the software.

Couple of things that need to be set straight

Nice article. Making the move to Linux Mint myself. Nevertheless there are some things to keep in mind:

1. Antivirus does exist for Linux, see for example ESET. Given all the threats out there, I do recommend getting anti-virus

2. If you use Office 365 in the cloud, you do not get all of the functionality available in the desktop versions. For example, no macros or ActiveX controls in the web version of MS Word. See for details for example https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/word-features-comparison-web-vs-desktop-3e863ce3-e82c-4211-8f97-5b33c36c55f8

3. Using Office 365 in the cloud means that Micro$oft still has access to much of your private data.

4. For many Steam games you need to install Proton, a fork of Wine. With Proton many games run without a hitch.

All in all, I think Linux Mint will fulfill the needs of many users. Another reason to move to Linux for me is that Windows 11 does not suport VR anymore. In Linux support is not complete yet, but at least offers more perspective through projects like Monado.

WINE 10 is still not an emulator, but Windows apps won't know the difference

Re: How well is Windows Recall supported?

My RTX3080 card is well supported with Nvidia drivers under Linux Mint. Got that working in no time. Proton makes many Steam games work. Now if only Linux would support my HP Reverb G2 VR headset...

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

Re: The solution depends on the problem

Yes indeed, on-line pornography can create unrealistic expectations, such as that when you call you can have a plumber at your house within 30 minutes.

Not a new issue

Already back in 2008 Bruce Schneier identified many issues with on-line age verfication. For a good overview what the problems are see this recent article: https://www.eff.org/files/2024/10/15/ny_av_eff_comments.pdf

Zuck takes a page from Musk: Meta dumps fact-checkers, loosens speech restrictions

Re: Trump isn't president of the rest of the world

You might find what you need on LinkedIn - that has turned into a Facebook Lite.

Microsoft declares 2025 'the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh'

Re: need TPM 2 chip?

Depends on the make and model of your motherboard. Asus, Gigabyte, MSI and SuperMicro have them.

Microsoft won't let customers opt out of passkey push

Re: Passkeys are a bad idea, or at least badly implemented

Until know I have been able to avoid biometrics for access to anything. If my biometric data is compromised, it is kind of impractial get a new face or new fingerprints.

Microsoft hijacks keyboard shortcut to bring Copilot to your attention

Re: Time to do the right thing and kick the habit.

Recently I installed Linux Mint 22 to see how it fares as an alternative to Windows. Definitely looks slick enough. At the moment the latest nVidia graphics drivers for my 3080 cannot be installed, many games I bought on Steam don't run, and my expensive VR headset has no support. The latter was a direct reason to look for an alternative to Windows 11, still on 10 now.

Then again, I will not be discouraged by this out of the box experience. I probably have not delved deeply enough into yet to get everything going. Still need to set up Wine and Proton to see how far I can get.

Seems like a pattern

Same idiotic company thought that is was a good idea to assign CTRL-F to forwarding an e-mail in Outlook where in any other sane program this invokes the find action. But noooooo, if you want to find text in an e-mail in Outlook, you have to press F4. Bastards!

Badass Russian techie outsmarts FSB, flees Putinland all while being tracked with spyware

Re: "Always keep a second passport"

In the Netherlands it is possible to get a second passport for business use with twice the regular number of pages. Often for obtaining visa the passport has to be given to an embassy for several days and this prevents you from traveling during that time. The second passport allows you to travel anyway. Also useful if you need to travel to conflicting countries.

Apart from that, many countries allow dual citizenship, and some countries, such as Morocco, make it just about impossible to get rid of Moroccan nationality. Which means as a Moroccan you can naturalize to a new nationality but not denounce your original citizenship. And the you have two passports.

Musk, Bezos need just 90 minutes to match your lifetime carbon footprint, says Oxfam

Re: What a load of nonsense

True, but the data shows that the local precipitation extremes are not increasing in frequency. Even the IPCC sees zero influence of climate on mean precipitation and heavy precipitation combined with pluvial flood landslide (Table 12.12 on page 1856 of AR6) except for the most extreme emission scenario RC8.5/SSP5-8.5 which is not credible at all.

Re: What a load of nonsense

Looking at the Finland article, the title is misleading. What the article says is that so many trees in Finland have been cut that the CO2 the forest absorbs is less than the country's emissions. In other words that Finland is not net zero anymore. It is not that the trees have stopped absorbing carbon.

The rain in Spain is extreme, but not unprecedented. On September 11, 1996 Tavernes de la Vall had 520 mm of rain and on November 3, 1987 the area around Gandia south of Valemcia even got 700 mm of rain.

What a load of nonsense

"Those damages include food supplies, which Oxfam estimates have led to crop losses able to provide enough food for 14.5 million people - annually between 1990 and 2023"

This is bollocks. Corn yields, for example, have never been better, in part due to fertilisation by higher levels of carbon dioxide in the air. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Also, a recent study shows that vegetation absorbs 31% more carbon than previously thought which means current climate models should be subject to defenestration. See also this article on global greening.

Eric Schmidt: Build more AI datacenters, we aren't going to 'hit climate goals anyway'

Re: "no-holds-barred" half-Nelson more like

See https://notrickszone.com/2023/04/15/tropical-paradise-islands-are-not-sinking-and-shrinking-most-are-in-fact-growing/

Saying goodbye to the tech dreams Microsoft abandoned with Windows 11 24H2

Microsoft, i hate you even more now

Removing WMR is a slap in the face of users who invested serious money in VR. My HP Reverb G2 will become a useless paperweight once I can no longer hold on to Windows 10. It is not just me, but also the countless people in the simulation community who are affected by this decision.

Microsoft throws in the towel on HoloLens 2

Another reason for me to stick with Windows 10.

Datacenters to emit 3x more carbon dioxide because of generative AI

Cool!

This should add to the greening of our planet. See for example: "Elevated CO2 concentrations contribute to a closer relationship between vegetation growth and water availability in the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes" (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ad5f43/pdf)

Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits

Re: Water under the bridge

All the calculators I have bought in my adult life are HP calculators and RPN to me is a far more logical way to do calculations. Defintitely a feature and not a bug in my book.

Punkt MC02: As private, and pricey, as a Swiss bank account

Not secure enough

A truly private phone would have hardware switch or switches built in that physically airgap wifi, microphone, camera and satellite positioning in the phone. That would be my minimum requirement for starting to call a phone secure. Even then, the phone could still be tracked through triangulation of the 5G connection.

Destroying offshore wind farms is top priority for Trump if he returns to presidency

Re: Concerns for the whales are legit

This is a thoughtful response. Learn something new every day. There is also an anchoring technique using suction buckets that makes far less noise. The use of air bubbles as Kevin points out below also sounds interesting.

Concerns for the whales are legit

Pile driving operations for placing the wind mills create noise levels of 190 dB and sonar equipment for surveying even goes up to 200 dB. Under water, sound travels much faster and is dampened less than in the atmosphere. To compare, 190 dB is a sound pressure 1 million times the sound of of a jackhammer (130 dB) which can cause almost instant measurable hearing loss in humans.

To whales, sound is critical for communication, and important for navigation, finding food, and avoiding predators. There is some controversy whether whale deaths are linked to wind turbines, looks like the jury is still out on that. Keep in mind though that whales are not the only sea mammals that will be effected.

This said, I seriously hope the orange man is lawfully convicted and put away where he can do no more harm to society.

Undersea bit-barn biz offers 90-day trial of submerged server system

Re: Really?

In 2022, Google's data centres used 22.29 TWh of energy, which is 8.0244 × 10^16 J, including the energy to run the cooling. The global sea water volume is 1,370,000,000 cubic kilometers. Heating a kg of water by 1 K requires 4184 J. Google's energy use would increase the average world sea water temperature approximately by 0.000000014 K. An immeasurably small difference.

Interesting take. Reminds me of the company that rented servers the size of radiators to heat homes. It was a thing a couple of years ago, but lately not so much in the news anymore. Maybe the fans are too loud, I don't know.

Anyhow, geographically splitting the data centres statistically would help to avoid some of the troughs in power generation, but it is no guarantee. Winter nights can be dead calm and then your servers would still need thermally generated power. And the duplication of equipment would definitely increase the cost.

The whole idea of a submerged data centre seems interesting though as a permanent sea bed structure with regular access. The tides could provide the water flow to dissipate the heat. And northern seas can be quite cold. Would be interesting to hear whether there is a business case for this.

"...opportunities with offshore wind farms. This would give it ready access to renewable energy, overcoming challenges related to power transmission..." good luck running a server farm on variable power as the wind blows, or are we going to duplicate energy infrastructure with thermal power generation on shore?

Ruggedized phone group takes the Bullitt, calls in PWC as administrative receiver

CAT S62 Pro, one of a kind

My private phone is a CAT S62 Pro and no other phone offers a FLIR thermal camera with 320 x 240 pixels. Other phones only offer a quarter of that thermal resolution. With all of its features, it has quite decent battery life too, even after three years.

Since there are no recent security security updates (last one is of March 1, 2023 for Android 11), I am going to have to replace it soon. It sucks that there is no worthy successor on the market. Also, no way I am buying a Chinese brand.

Scientists mull Solar Radiation Management – a potential climate-change stop-gap

Re: Denier no more?

If you are referring to Fourier analysis, he got it right, as long as it is applied to bandwidth limited applications on stationary signals. Bandwidth limited also implies strictly periodical. For signals varying in frequency and time, newer methods, such as Complete Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (CEEMD) are much more appropriate. Each situation requires its own tool and in that sense, Fourier's work is incomplete, and therefore imperfect.