The weather forecast in Melbourne Australia are very poor unless they are for a few hours away. The melb weather isn't going to kill you either unless its an exceptionally hot day. The cold days aren't below freezing and they seem to have no ability to forecast tornadoes which are very rare. Tropical storms void the area and there is geography that breaks up thunderstorms. 140 years ago some of the locals where reported not to own any clothes (which may have been an exaggeration but the natives didn't wear much in the summer)
The weather forecast in Oklahoma City are extremely good but the spring time weather there used to kill a number of people every year. One TV station in Oklahoma used to have 4 full time meteorologist on staff.
OU used to have some of their forecast online but I can't find them right now. The tended to be better than the NWS in most cases and were better for spots around the world that most local forecasts. OU was the 1st weather school to have a supercomputer which might have made a huge difference.
Once OSx gets hacked in a big way, I expect that Apple will get sued for engineering negligence. I've made it clear to Microsoft that the next time their buggy software nails my server (which runs freebsd), they will have to answer in court. The last time they managed to pay off my hosting provider after their tech support people tried to talk me into installing anti virus software on the server. It wasn't a virus on the server, it was millions of machines trying to talk to my news server. That was Sep of 2003 and the thing is still going wild.
If you sell a modern operating system and the install disks aren't safe to use (meaning no innocent third party suffers damage) then the product must be recalled. I've had enough of this crud that the next time I'm in the cross hairs, I'm going after whoever dropped the ball and I don't care if its MS, Apple or Sun. There is no excuse for not recalling a CD since its small and cost so little. In past court cases involving cars, that has made a huge difference in payouts. If sun is shipping hackable software with their cheapest v100 which cost $1000 and the fix of sending everyone a new CD which cost $3 or.3% of the product cost, there isn't a judge in the US that won't give the damaged party most of what they are asking for.
The same goes for Apple. They have teamed up with an Antivirus software company with imac when they could have just included that feature in the OS. I have recently found a copy of an old check from an anti-virus company to a student which proves that the student was paid to write viruses to help improve the bottom line. Thats racketeering and the resulting class action suit could kill a company.
The old sats aren't there to provide position service, they are there to figure out what side of the Berlin wall a h-bomb explodes on. The rest was just extras. The idea was that after the fall of the USSR and the rise of usefulness of GPS, they new sats could be put into place with different features but then the powers that be decided that it may be very useful to know which side of the 38th Parallel a nuke goes off. The older sats are much better at that than the new ones so the new ones got pushed back. SA is "Selective availability" and its a lie factor put into the clock by delaying it random amounts however the way its done uses a mechanical device that isn't exactly the best design.
The US Gov't did promise that it would be there for a very long time. They are also removing the only other low cost timing option.
GPS isn't essential to either the phones or power grid. Its just and added feature. With phones it allows 100x the number of phones to operate in an area. With power it means you can coordinate bringing new generators on line within seconds with nearly no risk. The last east coast blackout may have lasted weeks if they hadn't had GPS to coordinate bringing systems back on the grid. Without GPS, an power station is going to have to call every other source of power and ask if they are brining on anything and verifying that the load is stable then they sync the system and throw the big switch. If they get it wrong or the phase gets shifted or the load changes, the entire grid supplies enough power to blow up their every expensive generator. The GPS based timing system allows then to detect those problems before they throw the switch.
I may know more about this than you do. I'm a member of the group that got SA shut off and advices the President about how to operate the system. I've spoken with guy who did the early design work. I've been using the NavStar GPS system for nearly two decades.
For timing, a power plant must be in sync to about 5% of a 60 hz cycle or else they will burn out their generators after a large scale. They used to use Loran but now thats gone in many parts of the US.
The Current GPS control systems don't allow rapid switching and all features that are turned on or off are done only when the sat is visible to the control system in Colorado.
What the DOD (and the DOT and the NSF) decided many years ago was that SA is broken (it never worked on some of the sats and had a problem of getting stuck and the Russians had published the psuedo random factors). That the GPS control system can't deny GPS to a small region using existing technology (it can only do a fraction of the globe) and at the time the electronics package on the F4 Wild Weasel could jam in a large enough area for military operations. The recommendation was to ditch SA for ever (and Clinton did a few years latter)
As far as the sats shutting down and not coming back up, its been tested. The fix is in the next gen sats which aren't even close for launch.
I know its the job of the military to be paranoid about things but there are times when you have to realize that your enemies will use your advantage against you. In the case of GPS, they choice to turn off the system is too risky compared to what (if anything) it will accomplish. All this little PR stunt to make American feel safer has done is convince anyone who is planning such a thing that they must use a Glonass receiver or a INS system.
Does the Whitehouse know that GPS is essential to timing many things such as the power grid?
I'm guessing this is some off the wall PR stunt to make people feel better that they can turn of GPS in an instant but the real facts are you can't shut down most of the sats unless they are in range of one of the few control stations and even then it might be a one way trip for some of the older ones.
Turning off GPS might just wipe out a great deal of mobile phones and other communications. It would be bad for aviation as well because one its turned off, there is no reason to ever turn it back on as far as pilots are concerned. And there is that small problem that the Europeans are building Galileo and the Russians still have GLONASS.
After seeing what Airbus is doing to Boeing and all the other military messes, I'm wondering who the politicians are working for because I know its not for the tax payers.
Try a cheap laser printer, they are much cheaper to operate. If color is needed, then consider a secondhand one. If shes doing runs for the entire class, buy an older business printer.
There is lots of redundancy built into the recievers but all they are doing is comparing the phases of two different signals and moving a needle that shows you how far off course you are. A GPS phone can make that needle jump sometimes but its rare and if the phone can get enough energy into one of the correct spots in the reciever, it can cause offset errors. On the ground before take off, you check that both VORs read within 2 degrees of each other. It turns out that if you miscalibrate both VORs at the same time and take off, you could be 4 degrees off course. When you do an approach into small town airport, the only things you have to make sure your in the right spot are the VORs and a local ADF and if your VORs are off by 5 degrees, you may end up flying into nearby hills or towers.
The Aussie version of the FAA send out a magazine every month and a few months ago they reported a large number of problems with mobile phones (mostly GSM) and a few other bits of equipment. Some of the problems were caused by devices where identical models were known not to cause problems.
There was a sat that would blink but it was because of its rotation. I last saw it in mid 1970s. You had to catch it was it was reflecting off the sun on the axis of rotation and it was a bit faster than a plane's strobe lights and it was moving very quickly.
Or maybe it was little green men or a secret military plane. It was long ago...
Storm tops on Oklahoma are usually about 50,000 ft but thats the visable could top. I think the top of the nasty weather is known to be above 90,000 on the big storms.
Most major cities have VORs at the main airport or nearby that define the airways. The result is a jet from St Louis to Denver will fly driectly over the VOR at Kansas City even though the best course would have been about 50 miles north. Keeping the jets on the jetways and not going free for all, allows controllers to concentrate on the jetway intersections and it also works well when problems happen since everything is planned in advance.
I do not want to be on a plane in solid IFR with a mobile phone that is on. Thats just too damn scary. I don't like the idea of being in a plane where the pilots can't see out the window and the only thing keeping it from flying into the rocks is few radio signals and a few small gyroscopes.
Thats not quite as bad as a quote I heard from some Doom players talking to each other in a plane "You grab the hidden shot gun and I'll go kill the two up the front"
Been there, done that, reported it, fix still not in qmail (as far as I know). You don't get the reward if the bug is an interaction between qmail and the os. I don't run qmail because of that issue. I could care less if the core code is secure unless its interactions with its enviroment (what ever that may be) are also locked down.
So you should have failed because Qmail is low hanging fruit...
Go grab a list of all the sendmail patches that work around OS issues (kernel bugs, race conditions, etc) and find the ones that apply to qmail and exploit them.
Remember the reward doesn't apply for these kinds of errors.
Part of my systems class was learning to work in teams. Our assignment was "write an windowing OS in ADA and run 4 different programs" The windowing was vt100ish windows. I was the only one to complete the task but I was also the only one to do it my self. I got my "working with a team" points by building a queing system because the 1st compiler task would run and finish, the second would slow down the 1st and end up not ever finishing and three would kill the 2nd and 3rd. One thing that happened was some of the students objected (to the sysadmin) about the queing system abusing resources and while it appeard the prof was sitting back ignoring the situation, he was doing his job of grading us on how we dealt with software development in the real world. And yes the que program did abuse the system... it watched the process list and played mmap games with bits of the compiler binaries and allocted memory to keep three comilers from ever starting.
When they turned it off, there were 6 sats in the existing constellation that couldn't do SA properly. Sometime in 2001 all new sats didn't even have the SA module installed since it was a big heavy bit of gear. Its one of the reasons they looked into regional jamming early on. An f4 wild weasel could jam GPS in a local area a decade ago as can AWACS and I'm willing to bet that the AWACS can also jam the others already. The USAF depends on GPS way to much to reintroduce SA and the regional jamming works very well.
And how does this work indoors? GPS works indoors too but not too good if the roof is decent. Repeaters have been used for nearly a decade as have pseudolites. The problem is a low cast psuedolite is a low cost gps jammer too.
The way the US AF turns off GPS now in a region will also turn off Galileo and GLONASS as well. The idea to turn it off at the sats is old an no longer useful to the the powers that have control of the swtich. The newer stats don't even have the ability to turn on the lie factor SA.
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How good they are depends on how much it matters.
The weather forecast in Melbourne Australia are very poor unless they are for a few hours away. The melb weather isn't going to kill you either unless its an exceptionally hot day. The cold days aren't below freezing and they seem to have no ability to forecast tornadoes which are very rare. Tropical storms void the area and there is geography that breaks up thunderstorms. 140 years ago some of the locals where reported not to own any clothes (which may have been an exaggeration but the natives didn't wear much in the summer)
The weather forecast in Oklahoma City are extremely good but the spring time weather there used to kill a number of people every year. One TV station in Oklahoma used to have 4 full time meteorologist on staff.
OU used to have some of their forecast online but I can't find them right now. The tended to be better than the NWS in most cases and were better for spots around the world that most local forecasts. OU was the 1st weather school to have a supercomputer which might have made a huge difference.
Once OSx gets hacked in a big way, I expect that Apple will get sued for engineering negligence. I've made it clear to Microsoft that the next time their buggy software nails my server (which runs freebsd), they will have to answer in court. The last time they managed to pay off my hosting provider after their tech support people tried to talk me into installing anti virus software on the server. It wasn't a virus on the server, it was millions of machines trying to talk to my news server. That was Sep of 2003 and the thing is still going wild.
.3% of the product cost, there isn't a judge in the US that won't give the damaged party most of what they are asking for.
If you sell a modern operating system and the install disks aren't safe to use (meaning no innocent third party suffers damage) then the product must be recalled. I've had enough of this crud that the next time I'm in the cross hairs, I'm going after whoever dropped the ball and I don't care if its MS, Apple or Sun. There is no excuse for not recalling a CD since its small and cost so little. In past court cases involving cars, that has made a huge difference in payouts. If sun is shipping hackable software with their cheapest v100 which cost $1000 and the fix of sending everyone a new CD which cost $3 or
The same goes for Apple. They have teamed up with an Antivirus software company with imac when they could have just included that feature in the OS. I have recently found a copy of an old check from an anti-virus company to a student which proves that the student was paid to write viruses to help improve the bottom line. Thats racketeering and the resulting class action suit could kill a company.
The old sats aren't there to provide position service, they are there to figure out what side of the Berlin wall a h-bomb explodes on. The rest was just extras. The idea was that after the fall of the USSR and the rise of usefulness of GPS, they new sats could be put into place with different features but then the powers that be decided that it may be very useful to know which side of the 38th Parallel a nuke goes off. The older sats are much better at that than the new ones so the new ones got pushed back. SA is "Selective availability" and its a lie factor put into the clock by delaying it random amounts however the way its done uses a mechanical device that isn't exactly the best design.
The US Gov't did promise that it would be there for a very long time. They are also removing the only other low cost timing option.
GPS isn't essential to either the phones or power grid. Its just and added feature. With phones it allows 100x the number of phones to operate in an area. With power it means you can coordinate bringing new generators on line within seconds with nearly no risk. The last east coast blackout may have lasted weeks if they hadn't had GPS to coordinate bringing systems back on the grid. Without GPS, an power station is going to have to call every other source of power and ask if they are brining on anything and verifying that the load is stable then they sync the system and throw the big switch. If they get it wrong or the phase gets shifted or the load changes, the entire grid supplies enough power to blow up their every expensive generator. The GPS based timing system allows then to detect those problems before they throw the switch.
I may know more about this than you do. I'm a member of the group that got SA shut off and advices the President about how to operate the system. I've spoken with guy who did the early design work. I've been using the NavStar GPS system for nearly two decades.
For timing, a power plant must be in sync to about 5% of a 60 hz cycle or else they will burn out their generators after a large scale. They used to use Loran but now thats gone in many parts of the US.
The Current GPS control systems don't allow rapid switching and all features that are turned on or off are done only when the sat is visible to the control system in Colorado.
What the DOD (and the DOT and the NSF) decided many years ago was that SA is broken (it never worked on some of the sats and had a problem of getting stuck and the Russians had published the psuedo random factors). That the GPS control system can't deny GPS to a small region using existing technology (it can only do a fraction of the globe) and at the time the electronics package on the F4 Wild Weasel could jam in a large enough area for military operations. The recommendation was to ditch SA for ever (and Clinton did a few years latter)
As far as the sats shutting down and not coming back up, its been tested. The fix is in the next gen sats which aren't even close for launch.
I know its the job of the military to be paranoid about things but there are times when you have to realize that your enemies will use your advantage against you. In the case of GPS, they choice to turn off the system is too risky compared to what (if anything) it will accomplish. All this little PR stunt to make American feel safer has done is convince anyone who is planning such a thing that they must use a Glonass receiver or a INS system.
They used Loran and that is being phased out.
Does the Whitehouse know that GPS is essential to timing many things such as the power grid?
I'm guessing this is some off the wall PR stunt to make people feel better that they can turn of GPS in an instant but the real facts are you can't shut down most of the sats unless they are in range of one of the few control stations and even then it might be a one way trip for some of the older ones.
Turning off GPS might just wipe out a great deal of mobile phones and other communications. It would be bad for aviation as well because one its turned off, there is no reason to ever turn it back on as far as pilots are concerned. And there is that small problem that the Europeans are building Galileo and the Russians still have GLONASS.
After seeing what Airbus is doing to Boeing and all the other military messes, I'm wondering who the politicians are working for because I know its not for the tax payers.
Try a cheap laser printer, they are much cheaper to operate. If color is needed, then consider a secondhand one. If shes doing runs for the entire class, buy an older business printer.
scary thing is billy gates bought exclusive digital rights to many of the worlds finest paintings over a decade ago for little more than a song.
In that case a nano light second is 29.99 cm which is that mulitple that all your building materials come in.
There is lots of redundancy built into the recievers but all they are doing is comparing the phases of two different signals and moving a needle that shows you how far off course you are. A GPS phone can make that needle jump sometimes but its rare and if the phone can get enough energy into one of the correct spots in the reciever, it can cause offset errors. On the ground before take off, you check that both VORs read within 2 degrees of each other. It turns out that if you miscalibrate both VORs at the same time and take off, you could be 4 degrees off course. When you do an approach into small town airport, the only things you have to make sure your in the right spot are the VORs and a local ADF and if your VORs are off by 5 degrees, you may end up flying into nearby hills or towers.
The Aussie version of the FAA send out a magazine every month and a few months ago they reported a large number of problems with mobile phones (mostly GSM) and a few other bits of equipment. Some of the problems were caused by devices where identical models were known not to cause problems.
A nano-light second is a foot...
65000 ft=65000ns or 65us.
Easier?
There was a sat that would blink but it was because of its rotation. I last saw it in mid 1970s. You had to catch it was it was reflecting off the sun on the axis of rotation and it was a bit faster than a plane's strobe lights and it was moving very quickly.
Or maybe it was little green men or a secret military plane. It was long ago...
Storm tops on Oklahoma are usually about 50,000 ft but thats the visable could top. I think the top of the nasty weather is known to be above 90,000 on the big storms.
Most major cities have VORs at the main airport or nearby that define the airways. The result is a jet from St Louis to Denver will fly driectly over the VOR at Kansas City even though the best course would have been about 50 miles north. Keeping the jets on the jetways and not going free for all, allows controllers to concentrate on the jetway intersections and it also works well when problems happen since everything is planned in advance.
I do not want to be on a plane in solid IFR with a mobile phone that is on. Thats just too damn scary. I don't like the idea of being in a plane where the pilots can't see out the window and the only thing keeping it from flying into the rocks is few radio signals and a few small gyroscopes.
Thats not quite as bad as a quote I heard from some Doom players talking to each other in a plane "You grab the hidden shot gun and I'll go kill the two up the front"
Been there, done that, reported it, fix still not in qmail (as far as I know). You don't get the reward if the bug is an interaction between qmail and the os. I don't run qmail because of that issue. I could care less if the core code is secure unless its interactions with its enviroment (what ever that may be) are also locked down.
And I agree with user 820979.
So you should have failed because Qmail is low hanging fruit...
Go grab a list of all the sendmail patches that work around OS issues (kernel bugs, race conditions, etc) and find the ones that apply to qmail and exploit them.
Remember the reward doesn't apply for these kinds of errors.
Part of my systems class was learning to work in teams. Our assignment was "write an windowing OS in ADA and run 4 different programs" The windowing was vt100ish windows. I was the only one to complete the task but I was also the only one to do it my self. I got my "working with a team" points by building a queing system because the 1st compiler task would run and finish, the second would slow down the 1st and end up not ever finishing and three would kill the 2nd and 3rd. One thing that happened was some of the students objected (to the sysadmin) about the queing system abusing resources and while it appeard the prof was sitting back ignoring the situation, he was doing his job of grading us on how we dealt with software development in the real world. And yes the que program did abuse the system... it watched the process list and played mmap games with bits of the compiler binaries and allocted memory to keep three comilers from ever starting.
When they turned it off, there were 6 sats in the existing constellation that couldn't do SA properly. Sometime in 2001 all new sats didn't even have the SA module installed since it was a big heavy bit of gear. Its one of the reasons they looked into regional jamming early on. An f4 wild weasel could jam GPS in a local area a decade ago as can AWACS and I'm willing to bet that the AWACS can also jam the others already. The USAF depends on GPS way to much to reintroduce SA and the regional jamming works very well.
And how does this work indoors? GPS works indoors too but not too good if the roof is decent. Repeaters have been used for nearly a decade as have pseudolites. The problem is a low cast psuedolite is a low cost gps jammer too.
Can you name a time in the last decade?
The way the US AF turns off GPS now in a region will also turn off Galileo and GLONASS as well. The idea to turn it off at the sats is old an no longer useful to the the powers that have control of the swtich. The newer stats don't even have the ability to turn on the lie factor SA.
You haven't been looking at the politics around Galileo have you?
I would love to see an IBM badged mac just to give a new meaning to the phrase "IBM compatible computer"