Posts by pklausner

Mysterious X-37B spaceplane flies again, this time carrying a quantum GPS alternative

Why going after the satellites? Aren't the ground stations easier?

One detail of GPS, Galileo et al which is not mentioned:

The satellites don't simply *know* their positions. They're constantly ranged from a network of ground stations. The resulting ephimerides get frequently re-calculated and uplinked to the satellite. Without this correction, they become useless within days. Which happened to Galileo in 2019:

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/galileo-accident/

So rather than taking out many satellites, why not going after the 2 (two) ground stations for Galileo. I guess the American military's GPS system can afford a few more. Probably still easier to eliminate their uplink stations than going after the space segment.

Debian isn't waiting for 2038 to blow up, switches to 64-bit time for everything

Don't forget the GPS epoch!

A mere 10 bit integer codes for weeks since 1980-01-01.

That means roll over is every ~ 19.6 years, i.e 1999, 2019, 2038 ... Client software is supposed to guesstimate somehow(tm) what the epoch is. Which can fail in interesting ways:

- Midnight 2001 (!) our commercial NTP server sent the overly trustful DB servers forward to 2019. Lots of fun ensured going back to 2001...

- Some remote site GPS board had its 1997ish build time burnt in as cutoff date. So at 1999 + 17 years: bingo: back to 1997!

The real reason why Trump is killing the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawai'i

Re: Correlation != Causation

The article's Goldilocks explained this, didn't it? Most of the current CO2 level is natural. The increase beyond the - again, natural - yearly summer/winter variation is humans emitting CO2 at geological scale minus a volcano eruption here and there.

The sensitivity of the resulting greenhouse temperature to CO2 increase (and implicated H2O vapour increase) is sooo difficult to calculate, that it took Svante Arrhenius 40 pages in *1896* to arrive at about + 5 .. 6 Celsius per doubling. Just based on first principles, observations and paper & pencil based math. https://www.rsc.org/images/arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf

Modern models incorporate many more feedback loops to arrive at + 2 .. 3 C per doubling. No wishful thinking lets the 1st principles go away or even reverse the causal link.

Re: AGW/Climate change? What a laugh!

HAARP was shut down years ago.

Stop geoengineering? Like emitting CO2 in geologically relevant quantities? Seems not everyone agrees there.

Pidgin is back, so let's talk about why a local chat client matters

Re: Whack-a-mole

> refusing admittance to 3rd party clients was over

Aren't you a bit too optimistic here?

There's no 3rd party app for the most wide spread messenger in Europe. That is why? Programmers too lazy to talk with WhatsApp? Really?

Or ask Beeper how their iMessage interface is going.

Monopolies do what monopolies can do.

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

Re: Just another alarmist global warming rant

1960s? I raise you a Svante Arrhenius, 1890s. With pen and paper he calculated the sensitivity of the green-house effect to changes of the CO2 levels. He was off by a factor of 2. Pretty good I'd say.

Ironically enough, in the early 1900s, scientists pondered burning coal just to create a warmer climate. Dropped the plan, they figured nobody could burn *that* much coal.

Ontario responds to Trump tariff by pitching Starlink deal into the trash

Re: Great pic *roll eyes*

> He's quite deliberate.

Exactly.

Whatever you think of Musk, he's *not* stupid. So he deliberates and thinks: 'Oh, I do a Nazi salute and decorate it a wee bit so that the liberals get fooled.' Anybody believes Nazis won't like this because he thumps his breast before saluting? I have a bridge to sell you...

Windows: Insecure by design

Re: The Price of Freedom

> I was always able to fix those problems via a boot-time command line, or a config file change. YMMV.

>

It's easy for you, it's easy for me. But that is NOT the definition of "just works".

Just one grub flag is too much askance from a civilian who needs the computer to solve other problems, not computer problems. You have to sacrifice half your CPU to virus scanners, re-install every other year. Yet, Joe Average can do *that*. But fiddling with systemd and friends? No.

Apple says if you want to ship your own iOS browser engine in EU, you need to be there

Re: Apple really, really, REALLY wants the EU to park a tank on their their lawn, do they?

Europe does have sucessful compnies and innovation. But relative to its size and GDP it's not doing well and it seems to get worse by the year.

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

> The result is the next step in the development of Unix

I smell a plan 9 here...

Germany's wild boars still too radioactive to eat largely due to Cold War nuke tests

The real answer is 42!

42 MJ/kg, that is, the energy content of gasoline. This is one of the highest chemical energy densities to be found anywhere. The chemical processes in a battery must be perfectly reversible many times, which makes it basically impossible to reach the same ordner of magnitude. Think about it this way: pumping gasoline delivers around 25 MW. Don't expect an electric charger like that.

Cosmic rays more likely to glitch out water-cooled computers

Re: Watch out for the hydrogen

Doesn't H2O translate to 2/3 hydrogen, 1/3 oxygen? But true, many hydrocarbons have slightly more than 2/3, like the alkanes with CnH(2n+2)

Investors start betting against Bitcoin with short-trade products

Never underestimate the stupidity of people. True hodlers will never admit they were wrong.

Tis but a scratch :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmInkxbvlCs

Demand for GPUs used to mine crypto 'disappearing', says ASUSTeK

Re: Not Only That

Unfortunately, no.

Bitcoin adapts the difficulty to the available hash rate. Once enough miners dropped out, it becomes profitable again at whichever lower price & hash level.

Google Docs' AI-powered inclusive writing auto-correct now under fire

Re: Orwellian nightmare

"Language does matter"

Yes and no.

It matters how you use it within the established framing. But trying to change the framing to permanently change its impact, that doesn't work. It boils down to the disproven Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: the linguistic structure of your language does *not* limit your thinking.

Shanghai lockdown: Chinese tech execs warn of supply-chain chaos

Re: Get out

A lockdown reduces the number of cases, it does *not* reduce the number of deaths resulting from the infections which happened anyway.

If (if!) we are to believe the official figures, then the Case Fatality Rate is an astonishingly low 1 / 100000. If all 25 Mio locked down people were infected, that would be 250 dead. As deaths lag behind infections and sloppy counting, make that 2500.

For comparison. The UK death toll is 320. Currently. Every single day.

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=~GBR

UK government responds to post-Brexit concerns and of course it's all the fault of those pesky EU negotiators

Applying the very same logic you could claim that Remain was supported by 36%(ish).

Remember: Non voters by definition do not count. And what little research exists on their hypothetical votes, it appears that they would not change results too much. After all, they did not even bother to vote, so why would you expect strong opinions either way?

Tonga takes to radio, satellite, motorboat comms to restore communications after massive volcano blast and tsunami

Re: Cable Nitpicking.

Exactly. Embarrasing for ElReg not to check _the_ undersea cable reference before publishing:

https://www.submarinecablemap.com/landing-point/nukualofa-tonga

Epoch-alypse now: BBC iPlayer flaunts 2038 cutoff date, gives infrastructure game away

Re: People fuss so....

32 bit? I'm only aware of a the infamous 10 bit week counter which occasionally breaks software trying to guesstimate the epoch from their build date or whatever the programmer fancied.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_week_number_rollover

International Monetary Fund warns crypto-related risks could soon become systemic

Re: "cryptocurrency easily crosses borders"

Crossing borders is easy for money.

Crossing borders stealthily ... not so much.

You need lots of it and pay a lot for it - ask you local mafia don.

Actually, this is the *only* advantage of Bitcoin for the savvy: illegal money transfers are cheaper and harder to trace.

Sweden asks EU to ban Bitcoin mining because while hydroelectric power is cheap, they need it for other stuff

Re: I second that request.

You can't control the number of bitcoin miners. The expected bitcoin price steers how much the miners will invest in gear and electricity.

Swiss lab's rooftop demo shows sunlight and air can make fuel

Re: Policy shift from whom? The Gods of physics?

42 is the answer

42 MJ of energy per kg of hydrocarbons, that is. Really hard to beat for any other chemical process.

LinkedIn shutting down in China after mounting government pressure to censor social media content

Re: to sunset

Not a native speaker here. So it's not true, that "In English, any noun can be verbed"?

It's time to delete that hunter2 password from your Microsoft account, says IT giant

Microsoft is dogfooding their own advice on Azure VM...

become root w/o any authentication whatsoever

https://twitter.com/amiluttwak/status/1437898746747097090

Not too bright, are you? Your laptop, I mean... Not you

Re: Ah, a first time user

Oh noes!

Carriage return for paragraphs is an abomination!

Go semantic newlines - https://sembr.org

Tesla battery fire finally flamed out after four-day conflagration

No.

1 Megapack stores 3 MWh.

1 liter of gasoline stores ~ 9 kWh

So one full size container of batteries translates to ~ 300 liters of fuel.

Three things that have vanished: $3.6bn in Bitcoin, a crypto investment biz, and the two brothers who ran it

Are you a prince confronted with the wheat and chessboard problem?

Bank of England ponders minting 'Britcoin' to sit alongside the Pound

Re: Global Warming?

There are no primes or in any way interesting numbers being "mined".

The first miner who manages to create a valid block for the chain can spend the bitcoin reward assigned to himself in that new block.

Oh hello. Haven't heard much from you lately: Linux veteran Slackware rides again with a beta of version 15

Re: Slackware on a floppy plus ISDN....

1991? When you needed Minix to get it installed?

A decades-old lesson on not inserting Excel where it doesn't belong

Re: CSV RFC XML TLA

Actually, SQLite does have an extension module which allows you to access a CSV file just as a normal table: https://www.sqlite.org/csv.html

UK getting ready to go it alone on Galileo

Re: Galileo blocking BeiDou

How about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerguelen_Islands ?

Top banker batters Bitcoin for sucky scalability, security

Re: No.... really??

The central banks only create the actual cash. All the other money on the books is created by the commercial banks. The central bank interest rate just sets the incentive for them to grant credit aka create money.

Cryptocoiners may not have noticed, but we are beyond simple token money, be it cowrie shells or bitcoins.

Wait, what? The Linux Kernel Mailing List archives lived on ONE PC? One BROKEN PC?

Most likely that's why he did not expose it to the interwebs, but merely to his couch.

Re: Unbelievable.

Most likely that's why it was not reachable from the outside.

Want to keep in contact with friends and family without having to sell your personal data?

Re: Perhaps I'm the only one left

> They still work and require surprisingly little

> in the way of personal info to use

>

Think again.

Modern automated sorting machines must scan the recipient's address to do their job. While they are at it, the may as well scan the sender. Ah. And store the records. Now, they wouldn't do that, would they?

Well, here a German Post competitor was caught with the fingers in the sweet data cookie jar: http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/postfirma-pin-mail-hortet-millionen-briefdaten/7795758.html

Will never happen again, of course.

Vivaldi boss: It'd be cool if Google went back to the 'not evil' schtick

It's VIVALDI, the 2nd incarnation of OPERA which also is not exactly a giant...

Boffins prove oil and water CAN mix – if you do it in a gas giant

Ocean floor?

It says "findings shed light on how water-repelling substances behave under high pressures, such as those found at the ocean floor" but then the pressure is 20 times that of the Mariana trench.

Which ocean floor are they talking about? Or did I miss the part where boffins are already exploring extra-solar ocean floors?

75 years ago, one Allied radar techie changed the course of WW2

Re: "changed the course of WW2"

The Dieppe raid was before Stalingrad. But true, the Normandy invasion probably was also motivated by the wish to preempt Stalin.

systemd'oh! DNS lib underscore bug bites everyone's favorite init tool, blanks Netflix

Re: Underscore?

http://domainkeys.sourceforge.net/underscore.html clearly says _ is forbidden for hostnames. And the point of using _ in the examples was that DNS can serve not only hostnames.

For the Netflix problem at hand: isn't the requested server name a hostname in DNS parlance?

CERN concern: Particle boffins join backlash against Euro Patent Office's King Battistelli

Re: Although I was a Remainer...

Feel with your screaming 49%, but: the EPO is _not_ the EU, it is an international organisation _like_ the EU. So actually, the Brexiteers did _not_ save you from King Batistelli.

Google un-clogs Landsat and Sentinel-2 imagery downloads

Yes, ESA (and Eumetsat for the weather satellites) are separate organisations.

No, Sentinel x / Copernicus is funded (not operated) by the EU, so some untangling will be necessary.

A perfect marriage: YOU and Ubuntu 16.04

Re: Gnome2/Mate-like desktop switcher -- avaiable in unity?

Pah! Real men fix config.h for customisation http://dwm.suckless.org/customisation/ ;-)

Trivial path for DDoS amplification attacks found by infosec bods

Is there such a thing as authenticated or encrypted TFTP?

I don't think so... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tftp

Revealed: Why Amazon, Netflix, Tinder, Airbnb and co plunged offline

Those pesky metadata...

... obviously are hard to get right. Joyent has a completely different cloud, yet failed with a similar problem, cf:

https://www.joyent.com/blog/manta-postmortem-7-27-2015

Junk in your trunk is Amazon Germany's new delivery plan

Re: What can go wrong????

Audis are not from Wolfsburg; head quarters and main assembly line are in Ingolstadt, 80 km north of Munich. So at least it is proper Bavarian stuff :-)

MONSTER COOKIES can nom nom nom ALL THE BLOGS

Wrong inference?

> I think it's not unfair to infer that a server should be able

> to support requests with at least 300 x 4kb cookies.

>

Doesn't the quoted section translate to "at least 20 x 4kb cookies"?

Which makes much more sense than 1.2MB sized requests...

Helpdesk/Service Desk Recommendations

Re: FogBugz

I second FogBugz http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/

It has a perfect email integration. And clever full text analysis, e.g. the spam filter engine for incoming mails also automatically files non-spam to the proper work queues. It much favours full-text search and reporting over explicit fields to keep the number of dedicated fields as lean as possible. Most other trackers offer a byzantinian maze of fields and drop downs which are a pain to fill in and a complete waste of screen space. Ever received a trouble ticket email from a big ISP? Where you have to scroll endlessly to get beyond the form boilerplate and read about the real issue?

This actually also is its biggest disadvantage: management loves to code its local idea of proper procedure into ever more custom fields. Which FogBugz wouldn't let you easily...

Ubuntu N-ONE: 'Storage war' with Dropbox et al annihilates cloud service

Re: 25 and 50GB free - erm, who?

Just for the record:

* Dropbox' underlying storage is Amazon S3

* Ubuntu One's storage is ... Amazon S3

So if you want to be sure that No Such Agency has a direct tap into your files [not], you need to look into an encrypted service:

* Wuala - 5GB free, encrypted storage in Switzerland et al, Java sync client works on all major platforms - albeit not as smooth as Dropbox :(

Any other?

You'll NEVER guess who's building the first Ubuntu phones in 2014

Flags are dead easy

All true. But, honestly, do you think anybody has a problem understanding what the flags mean? See. And the fact that it annoys nitpicking nationalists is a nice bonus ;-)