Posts by imanidiot

Watchdog clears 90 per cent of US commercial aircraft to land in low visibility at nation's 5G C-band airports

Re: Finally.

I think you misunderstand the problem. All radio transmitters have "harmonics" outside the main band (and outside their allocated frequency band). 5G is no different. There is a spec on how much harmonics and "spurious" RF they're allowed to generate outside the band and for the vast majority of applications this is more than enough to ensure no problems arise as the receiver of equipment designed outside the band would just reject the low "background noise". Radar altimeters however have to be (in order to function) very very sensitive and cannot easily just filter out noise from their own transmission, which makes it far easier for them to get influenced. The slightly higher margins in the EU mean that the main peaks of the harmonics lie just outside the band of radar altimeters while in the US the harmonics lie just INSIDE the band of the radar altimeters (thus causing problems) and their higher power means that they are more likely to lead to problems.

Radar altimeter manufacturers did nothing wrong when these devices were designed. RF spectrum rules as applied back then would have ensured no harmonics and spurious emissions from devices in adjacent bands would have interfered (as the frequency bands separating them would have been wider).

Thus the rule still stands, it's the 5G masts causing radio emissions outside their assigned spectrum band (or atleast increasing background noise levels) that can interfere with radar altimeters and it's thus 5G musts that must prevent that from happening.

Re: Finally.

Only if you can show that A: you followed best design practices at the time of designing the thing, B: altering your device is prohibitively or unreasonably expensive and that the other party refuses to pay for such an expense(and they'll bring in an outside expert to make sure the cost is actually real and not inflated) and C: that the functionality of your device cannot be easily and affordably be performed by a different device not subject to those bandwidth problem (plus nowadays you'd probably not get an FCC approval for such a device)

With what you describe they'd probably tell the judge " we made this little antenna filter box to reject anything outside their bad, it costs 2 dollars, they should have put it in their design". All of this is a long way of saying, it all has to be within reason. Judges will know if you're taking the piss and rule accordingly.

But if you had done that in the 50s and it became an important device for safety or every day utility then yeah, that pretty much sums it up.

Re: Finally.

You do realize that the way radio spectrum laws work, "new" users to a frequency band are the ones that have to make sure they don't interfere with existing users in other bands, right? And if that means that the telco's bought a useless frequency because someone in a different band has problems due to "out of band" sensitivity that is still THEIR problem, not the existing users.

It's not even about "buy them new altimeters" because the way aviation and instrument certification works means that many older planes out there simply cannot be equipped with newer altimeters because they are simply not certified to use those new instruments. If somebody even makes one that can be installed in those older planes. (and just to make you feel old, first gen Boeing 777 came into service 1995. That is nearly 30 years ago. 747-8 is newer, first was delivered in 2012, but strongly based on earlier generations and might still be limited in what instruments it can take). So if it means "buy them new altimeters" it means pay for the cost and ongoing "responsible authority" of certifying those new instruments for use in every old plane out there.

Re: Finally.

That is because BY LAW, the onus is on the phone companies to ensure there is no interference. The reason there is "no problem" (not entirely true) in Europe and Japan is that they are using slightly lower frequencies (so more margin) and lower max power levels per mast.

The FAA was assuming (bad assumption) the phone companies would figure it out and ensure there would be no interference. Now that there potentially is they have to make a stink about it. They've been doing that for a lot longer behind the scenes without making noise but phone companies have basically been sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting "we paid good money for these frequencies so we're going to use them" over and over without even trying to work with the FAA to solve the issue.

Now that's wafer thin: Some manufacturers had less than five days of chip supplies, says Uncle Sam

Re: Bog Chips, little chips , ....

Not easily no. (Warning, the following is a noobs understanding of lithography optics and since I am by no means an optics engineer, I might be wildly off base. This goes on MY understanding of Photolithography imaging from working in that field on related machinery as a Mechatronics engineer)

Lithography machines have a minimum feature size, but (although this is not a hard spec) also an upper limit on how large of a feature they can image. This has to do with the fact that what they project isn't an "image" of the reticle as we expect it to be but a diffraction pattern of the reticle where only the 0th and 1st order refraction of the wavefront are projected sharply on the wafer. To do this the refracted light must "fit" through the lens column and if the features get too big, this doesn't really work anymore.

So in order to get 280nm features you need a machine designed for that sort of feature size and machines in that range (down to about 140nm feature size) were built up until the early 2000s. Everything after that is not really designed to handle it and might have problems sharply imaging large features, depending on the orientation and location of those features within the exposure field.

Saved by the Bill: What if... Microsoft had killed Windows 95?

Re: Windows 95 + a few service packs

IIRC (though my memory is a bit patchy from that time, not due to old age now, but young age then) that USB "support" started in Win 95 SP2. But it was a bit patchy and USB things often required some driver fiddling to get working. It wasn't until SP3 that it started behaving a bit.

Employers in denial over success of digital skills training, say exasperated staffers

Narrow versus broader skill training

In my experience what most employers tend to offer "of their own free will" is not actually training that really advances knowledge or skill, it's just button pushing in their latest bit of software. The PHBs and other manglement feel great because they're "training staff" but in the it is usually training with a very narrow focus only applicable to the software stack and methods used by that particular company. Employees (rightly) feel that this is not proper training and time wasting.

What employees expect is (broader) training in technical skills that they can then develop and apply in that job and any later jobs (within our outside the company currently employing them). That is ofcourse the opposite of what PHBs desire, because they want wage-slaves chained to their desks forever, too afraid to leave the company for greener pastures.

Apple grabs smartphone crown as iPhone 13 wakes up the fanbois, leaves Chinese rivals eating dust

Re: I'm voting with my wallet.

And they're also throwing billions into building new fabs at a pace they wouldn't have ever before.

Chip fabs are profiting right now, true, but that's not proof they're the cause.

Re: I'm voting with my wallet.

The shortage isn't artificial. The sudden and unexpected shift (and growth) in required chip fab capacity and fab type (lots more demand for "old" node capacity) has really thrown a spanner in the works of every major chip manufacturer out there and they're all struggling to find a new balance to serve as much of the demand as possible.

Tesla driver charged with vehicular manslaughter after deadly Autopilot crash

Re: New Name for Autopilot needed

"The first thing they did was investigate the flight deck crew looking for radicalized individuals and exhausted that line of investigation before anyone wondered, “gee what if the robot plane overpowered the crew killing everybody on board?”"

uhmm, no, that's not what happened. It's one of the options investigated but ruled out quite quickly. You'll find they look into that aspect for every crash nowadays (particularly after the highly publicized Germanwings crash due to pilot-suicide). Just part of any air crash investigation, nothing is ruled out. Doubts about the MCAS system and it's functionality were already being raised and Boeing was furiously working on damage mitigation and finding ways to keep things under wraps when the second incident occured that finally let to the exposure of the entire sordid affair.

Re: New Name for Autopilot needed

Tesla's lane keeping system is notoriously buggy and stupid, to the point that it has already lead to at least one deadly crash into a lane divider because the Tesla started following the space between an off-ramp lane and the normal lane (https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/02/data-shows-tesla-owner-experienced-same-glitch-days-before-deadly-2018-crash/)

All these incidents show the dangers of (bad) level 2 and 3 autonomy in road vehicles. The humans get complacent and stop paying attention because it's worked many many times before. A small deviation or change in outside parameters suddenly leads to the system behaving differently and the human just doesn't notice because they've zoned out. Our monkey brains just aren't very good at performing these "mindless" monitoring tasks very well

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

Re: Paging Musk

Let's focus on airdropping things like food and water, and supplies to build or repair shelter. Let's not take capacity away for a PR stunt.

Re: They said I were mad t' build undersea cable on top of a volcano

Since it's a subduction zone on "the ring of fire" there isn't really anywhere to put a cable that isn't (potentially) on top of a volcano.

Re: Did I miss something here?

It ensures service over as much of the full route as possible, it does not guarantee service for each individual node/country along the way (since not every country/node has both cables running to/through it).

Money. What else? (see this article

TLDR: After a previous incident where the fiber cable got cut an agreement was signed between Kacific and Tonga Satellite Limited (as far as I can tell a government owned company) to provide satellite bandwidth for a lump sum payment of roughly 6 million USD up front. Apparently someone in the government balked at that amount of money (probably because when the undersea fiber cables are working they don't need it) and the Tongan government has since been frustrating things and delaying on making the payment.To the point of trying things like saying TSL wasn't authorized to sign the contract and de-registering it, which has since been ruled illegal by the Tongan supreme court

Ad blockers altering website code is not a copyright violation, German court rules

Re: Great idea

The legitimate interest one is annoying. GDPR has sharply defined what "legitimate interest" actually is and what companies are allowed to do with data gathered for those purposes. The problem is of course that companies cannot be trusted to do ONLY exactly that with the data once it's been gathered and a user has no way to prove certain data was misused. Likewise it would be very hard even for a government authority to do a surprise inspection of a company and it's website code and prove definitively that it was breaking the rules. I get why they thought putting in the exception for legitimate interest into the rules was a good idea but it did sort of unbolt the barn doors and it didn't take long for the horses to notice.

European Space Agency whittles wannabe astronauts down from 23,000 to 1,391

Re: "opening up applications to would-be astronauts with a physical disability"

The legs are often used to "anchor" a person while he/she performs various tasks with the hands. I wonder how they would handle that for a disabled person missing (use of) a leg for instance.

Lawmakers propose TLDR Act because no one reads Terms of Service agreements

Re: Garbage

I'd go one further, if one contradicts the other, the customer who finds the contraction is paid $10k by the company. If the contradiction is found during a dispute, the customer is additionally automatically ruled as the winner.

Planning for power cuts? That's strictly for the birds

Re: Another bird poop story

Birds and power wires, not always a happy combo. Sometimes the angry pixies have had enough and get extra angry: https://youtu.be/tqvVYWBGucU

North Korea says it's launched a third hypersonic missile, this time reaching Mach 10

Re: Flying through atmosphere?

Depends on who you ask. 60km is below the von Karman line, so by most definitions not space, but the FAA acknowledges (or atleast until recently acknowledged) anyone passing 60km as astronauts.

US Senator Marco Rubio calls Intel cowards for scrubbing remarks about Xinjiang and apologizing to China

"unless your "workforce" is truly untrainable deadweight"

I don't know.. I've encountered some workplaces where a misplaced grenade would probably result in a net increase of the worlds productivity. Usually in the public sector though.

Back to school for Microsoft as it prises apart the repairable Surface Laptop SE

But what about board views and schematics?

If a misplaced drink can kill a few caps or resistors and destroy a few board traces it'll still be screwed, no matter if other parts can be swapped. With the proper data, plenty of people should be capable of fixing that, but if MS doesn't want to provide those or uses proprietary unobtainium parts that are exactly the same as available chips but locked to the board by serial number (*cough* like Apple and Samsung *cough*) then a simple drop of Cola on the wrong spot will kill it just the same.

As a Mr. Clinton the cat says: Schematics or die!.

--> The one with all the burn marks please

Re: Misleading

With todays memory access speeds and the way a lot of devices are set up it's also often just very very hard to get things to work properly with the added capacitance and resistance of a connector screwing up the line impedance.

Logitech Signature M650: A mouse that will barely emit a squeak or a clickety-click

Nothing beats the MX Master imho

Not the cheapest but a much better mouse than the vast majority of what's out there. Also available in a vertical version.

My absolute favorite is the MX1000 that I've been using for going on 20 years now though. Which they could just make new ones of those. Bombproof, smooth mechanics, good responsiveness (even with the ancient wireless tech that it uses) and obviously lasts a LONG time. Only had to replace the battery at some point as the thing just couldn't handle a full days work anymore without blinking an angry red LED at me.

Re: IPA all the way...

In my experience meths do not always work the same as IPA. The difference is subtle and often not noticeable, but when it comes to sticky stuff like this it does matter in my experience. Recently cleaned some old film cameras (90's era) and meths didn't work to get the horrible sticky gunk that remained of the "rubberised" grips off. IPA just dissolved the rubbery goop and remove it from the surface without much trouble.

Nvidia promises British authorities it won’t strong Arm rivals after proposed merger

Re: Take ARM into public ownership, tell nvidia to go sew some roses

What in the world makes you think the UK/GB is in any position to go strategically independent? Or that ARM is actually strategically important to the UK/GB?

Canon: Chip supplies are so bad that our ink cartridges will look as though they're fakes

Re: Playing the "Enviromentally Responsible" card

They're magically always recycled by HP themselves. Somehow. --> They probably help.

Google: We disagree with Sonos patent ruling so much, we've changed our code to avoid infringement

Re: This is a company who developed a technique of syncing speaker volumes across a wireless network

"Remember when patents used to be to protect ideas that were genuinely interesting, innovative or simply completely unlike anything that had gone before"

Start looking into old patents and you'll find that stupid, obvious and generic ideas are of all times. So your statement isn't necessarily true

Predictive Dirty Dozen: What will and won't happen in 2022 (unless it doesn’t/does)

Get a proper chair

Somehow (because Twitch streamers) a lot of youths have started to equate "Gaming chair" with "Chair comfortable to sit in for hours" when in reality most of them are absolute dog shit.

What happened is that a single seller of (decent-ish but highly over-priced) gaming chairs sponsored a lot of big streamers with free chairs, who then showed it off on camera, causing every kiddo and their mum to buy cheap-tat level gaming chairs as none of them wanted to be seen sitting in a boring black or god-forbid wooden chair during the pandemic, causing proper models of office chairs to be unavailable anywhere as "the market" refocused on the lowest common denominator.

My advice, get a proper, certified, made for purpose office chair at an business furniture seller meeting at minimum something like the EN1335 norm (That means at minimum adjustable lumbar support, adjustable seat depth, adjustable (and removable) arm rests, adjustable tilt.) Then take the time to set it to your liking just right. It's expensive, but if you're going to be destroying your body by sitting in it way too much then spend a little to slow that process down as much as possible. You expect your boss to pay for a decent chair when you're in the office, make sure you take care of yourself at home. Good pro-level office chairs can be had second hand (refurbished/reupholstered) for not shockingly much more than a shitty Ikea "office" chair, but are so much more comfortable.

Re: "two of them within walking distance from my front door"

While I understand completely how much it sucks not being able to drink gluten containing beers, I can also understand that if a brewery has a lot of experience and success brewing only gluten containing beers they might not be inclined to experiment with gluten-free beers. No matter which way you turn it, demand for it simply is lower and you need enough volume to fill a run (Brewing is very a very "batch" based process, and you can't easily run a batch smaller than your setup is intended for as cooking and cooling equipment etc requires a certain fill level for them to work as intended). So perhaps for that sort-of-new brewery, for them it just doesn't currently make sense to experiment with gluten-free beers. They could of course buy in from other suppliers, but that sort of defeats the "locally brewed" part.

Re: "All office chairs are gaming chairs"

"The poor guy freaked out. I guess he never really thought about what we did with our dairy cow"

People these days aren't used to anything... I may not live on a farm but I really don't get the idea of getting turned off meat from having to "harvest" an animal. Especially if it's a hobby farm animal it's probably had a 100x better life than a generic "for profit" farm animal and in general I don't agree with the view those are severely mistreated either (barring some exceptions). If people were meant to be purely vegetarian meat wouldn't be so tasty ;). Only annoyance is that I've developed an intolerance for pork and pork derived products so no more bacon.

Re: a ban on line drying laundry

HOAs are a ridiculous institution and a clear demonstration that these sorts of positions attract the most useless busybodies. I can understand some basic rules (and enforcement) on minimum maintenance etc so as not to make the area look TOO bad, but some HOAs take it WAY too far.

(I mean, if you want a laugh, just go to https://www.reddit.com/r/JustNoHOA/ )

It's the day before the grand opening but we need a firmware update. It'll be fine

Re: Windows upgrade in process

Surprised a computer inside a surgery room would even have an internet connection. I know atleast one hospital in NL has the computers running the surgery equipment and such all airgapped with only a single network link to a single computer outside the OR. Only way to get data onto them is through that computer outside the OR (Which is ofcourse loaded to the gills with software to prevent any nasties getting in and with a very strict firewall to the cables going to the OR equipment. Also decreases the risk of contamination as data carriers don't need to be brought into the clean environment.

You've stolen the antiglare shield on that monitor you've fixed – they say the screen is completely unreadable now

Re: Tobacco smoke and some things worse

Just some of the reasons that IMHO, mice and keyboards should be considered personal items and should NOT be shared between coworkers. No amount of cleaning is going to help in some cases.

Thank you, FAQ chatbot, but if I want your help I'll ask for it

Re: I am here to help. What can I do for you today?

Unless it's preceded by the words "I'm from the Government and"

In that case you're not going to see your loved ones for a while (or ever again).

US grounds investors in Chinese drone maker DJI over 'Xinjiang human rights abuses'

Re: What Human Rights Abuses?

[citations needed]

Gaza strip is not a forced labour camp, nor a prison camp. So not a gulag. Not a nice place to live certainly either. As for "incontrovertible fact" they're committing ethnic cleansing: [citation needed]. You're the one claiming crimes against humanity here. Evidence please. And from an independent 3rd party, not from Hamas or Hamas affiliated organisations. Who actually WOULD commit mass genocide against the Jews if given the slightest chance and have proven not to give 2 shits about truth or accurate reporting if it makes them look better or Israël worse. If Israël is doing ethnic cleansing, with an average population growth of 30% in the Palestine areas over the past 10 years they're certainly doing a very shitty job of it.

If you're going to accuse Israël of serious crimes, please do so with regard to reality. Plenty of things to actually accuse them of and be correct. It's not exactly being a beacon of humanity. Plenty of things to accuse the Palestinians and Hamas for and be correct too.

But we were talking about China. Not the Levant

This whole discussion however is still pointless whataboutism.

You're not pointing out hypocracy, you're going "look over there instead of over here". (And ignoring the criticism regularly leveled against Israël). That's whatabout-ism.

So in that light: If there is no issue, why are there so many of what appear to be massive prisons and labour camps in the region? Why are there hundreds if not thousands of people claiming they were physically and sexually abused? Why are there accounts of Uygur women being forced to use contraceptives or get sterilized even when the Han majority is encouraged to increase birth rates?

Right, because there is no issue according to the CCP there is no Uygur issue (or there won't be in a few years time anyway). It looks like not everyone agrees with that view

Jup, and plenty of criticism being leveled against that too. But we're talking about China here right now, not the US

Re: "[China's] actions are designed to prevent terrorism"

https://apnews.com/269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c

Re: Those that live in glass houses

Again, referencing past events that are nowadays acknowledged by the majority as indeed being abhorent and objectionable as a "whataboutism" for saying there apparently can't be criticism on current events happening now.

"The CPC's handling of Chinese minorities is simply excellent, based on the hard facts available. The US doe not compare"

Right. Is that why they have hundreds of prison camps there, holding (an approximated) 10% or more of the total population of this minority? Because of this "excellent" treatment?

The reason there is so little hard evidence is that the CPC is VERY careful on allowing any information out of the region. They hold tight control over anyone travelling into or out of the region (especially foreigners) and their 'great' firewall keeps a tight lid on any digital information. Just like they do on events like Tiananman square. Or chairman Mao's little oopsies that killed millions (such as the Four Pests campaign). But there is enough evidence to conclude there must be something very wrong. We might not be able to see the proverbial flames directly, but there's certainly enough smoke to know it's unlikely it's anything other than a fire.

Re: What Human Rights Abuses?

Even if it was true that Israel was hosting gulags for muslims (they aren't) or that they were doing ethnic cleansing (they aren't) your first line is a pointless whatabout-ism. "What do you mean I can't kick puppies? Look at those guys clubbing baby seals!"

There's plenty of criticism to be leveled at the whole Israël-Palestina conflict but gulags or ethnic cleansing certainly aren't the right terms to be using.

"sheer terror of China as a rising power" -> As any sane person should, since they're already demonstrating with the whole Uygur "issue" they can't be trusted with that power.

Re: Those that live in glass houses

Either you are a Chinese shill or you need to pull your head out of your ass.

Re: Those that live in glass houses

You mean that civil war that was a direct result of one side wanting to keep said slavery and the other side wanting to abolish it? The civil war that ended with the side wanting to abolish slavery actually doing so? You'd have had more of a point if you'd pointed at the "Jim Crow" laws and segregation policies that came after. But even then, those aren't comparable to what's happening in China to the Uygur minority.

And the reality is that even though the US is doing far from perfect when it comes to handling the whole skintone issue, it's MILES and MILES ahead of where it was and even further ahead of how China is handling it's minorities (the Uygurs aren't the only ones)

IMHO the question shouldn't be "why is the US the one doing this" but "why isn't everybody else".

Sun sets on superjumbo: Last Airbus A380 rolls off the production line

inevitable

Not really surprising. It was already clear from the first roll out that the A380 was never going to be a huge sales success. The program had suffered long delays and took so long to go from first concepts to actual aicraft that by the time it was actually built, the airline model on which it relied was already obsolete. The writing was already on the wall for the 747 passenger version by that time, as that too had been seeing dwindling sales numbers year on year. Boeing has already built the last 747 passenger jet ever and the last 747 (a freighter) will leave the line in 2022. One of the reasons the 747 has become so successful for so long is that it can be converted to freighter duty at the end of it's useful passenger carrying days, which means they keep value better and have remained interesting for airlines for longer for that reason. The 380 can't economically be converted to freighter duty (as the upper deck isn't strong enough to carry freight).

Re: Pretty agile for a big bugger

meh, I don't really mind the smell of avgas. It's the tetraethyllead that is in some of them that is a bit problematic.

Bloke breaking his back on 'commute' from bed to desk deemed a workplace accident

Re: Except the right to work from home...

I think the key words in the article in that regard are that the equipment used by the bloke in question was set up by the company in the home of the employee. Thus the company in this case IS responsible for the setup used in this case (and this is probably what will break some other cases if a person is just opening their company laptop on the kitchen table)

What came first? The chicken, the egg, or the bodge to make everything work?

Re: The Bodge...

"The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from."

Andrew S. Tanenbaum

Re: The Bodge...

Since we're talking German (custom or low scale) manufacture here it's pretty safe to assume it'll have been designed in metric. I've yet to meet a German that'll voluntary use Made-Up units.

Re: The Bodge...

The problem comes in when you have to have a running fit for a bushing or bearing mounted in what is probably no longer the correct bore size (because the original bearing has walked and "embiggened" the hole slightly that has to smoothly fit a now worn axle. If possible the best option is to make a new set of axle and bushings and fit the whole lot to a freshly bored out to size (and if need be relined or properly shimmed) bore. If it's a lightly loaded bearing you might get away with "wet fitting" a (very) slightly undersized bearing bushing in epoxy if you can't get the bore skimmed when too damaged.

I most definitely would at the very least have taken a micrometer to the axle and bore to give them actual measurements of the parts that the bushing needs to have a tight and/or running fit to.

Re: Where are the instructions?

Always has been and still is my tactic in the (nowadays rare) cases I'm involved in customer escalations (semiconductor lithography equipment). If I'm involved it's 99% of the time already an extremely long down (more than 12 hours downtime, measured in 6 figures an hour in lost revenue) It's not rare for things to go "more wrong" before they get better and in my experience it's in these scenarios that people tend to do stupid things that make things go from "minor oops" to "that'll take a few weeks to sort out". So in those cases my usual reaction is to close my laptop, get up and loudly proclaim: "well that's borked, let's go get coffee while the system is rebooting" or words to that effect. And I won't take No for an answer.

Especially when working on stuff that requires effective team work and coordination, that never happens in cases where every feels like "this has to be solved now" when the reality is that taking 30 minutes for a short break (Which is usually spend more casually discussing what just went wrong and formulating an effective plan that everybody agrees on and where everybody knows what to do next) usually actually saves time over the route of people running off to do something without coordinating and losing time all over the place because nobody knows what anybody else is doing.

Ooh, an update. Let's install it. What could possibly go wro-

Re: Netware? Less than 20 years ago? Where was he working - Jurassic Park?

The more I work with modern technology and the seeming clusterf*ck mishmash of disparate stuff mushed together to form a somewhat functional whole that sometimes stops working because apparently Mars is in retrograde and Phobos is transiting or something the more I think the old stuff might not be that bad. Sure it's sometimes a bit obscure but if it breaks you can probably actually trace exactly WHY it brakes because it's simple enough to do so. Instead of layer upon layer upon layer of crud, turds, brainfarts, incompetence and "good enoughs".