ErroneousBosh

I once read a transcript of an incident where ATC advised an aircraft with multiple engine failures and no hydraulics "Emergency team in attendance, runway at your discretion".

The reply: "Oh you want me to be all fancy and make it a runway, do you? Well, we'll see..."

They got it pretty close to the runway and it all had a far happier ending than this one.

It's a bit like how the petrol gauge on your car is out to lunch below about 1/8th of a tank.

If you're doing 32000ft/min you're clearly going *muuuuch* too fast, either up or down, implausibly so.

Unless you're in a jet fighter aircraft in which case showing up correctly on flightradar24 is not your biggest worry.

You'd think, but it's far stranger than that.

The actual VSI reading is taken either from barometric pressure or GNSS, and the source is flagged in a bit in the ADS-B packet. Then it's encoded in one of two forms in a 9-bit value with a single-bit sign.

If the 9-bit value is 0, there is no vertical speed available. Otherwise the vertical speed is encoded as +/-64 * (value - 1), giving a range from 0 to 510 for a range of bitfield values from 1 to 511.

Now this gives you a range in 64ft/min steps up to 32640ft/min. Most civilian high-performance aircraft will be in an absolutely screaming climb at around 10000ft/min and an 8000ft/min descent would be pretty aggressive - autopilots may drop into a 8000ish ft/min descent if there's a loss of cabin pressure, for example but 6000 would be considerably more comfortable. So even with your 9-bit value you've got enough resolution to show a fairly gentle climb (try staying below 1ft/sec climb or sink when flying by hand!) and something well in excess of what you'd normally want to experience.

> 22,000 feet/second is almost orbital velocity.

Solves one problem, gives you a different problem...

I got called all kinds of wrong for picking 1000mph, but it's kind of the midpoint of the numbers I get from an 18-metre plane collapsing into the ground in a little over 1/30th of a second, single frame of video.

One would assume they'll also be left out of the inevitable bust in six months to a year's time when the money people come looking for the ROI.

For receiving you can get away with nearly anything but for transmitting an aerial has to be quite close to resonant to be any good.

> Just like you can use a stumpy monopole whip for 144 Mhz even though it's 6 inches long, and it will help significantly (but behave like an omni capacitive reactance element)

If you mean the little rubbery aerials on walkie-talkies, if you open one up you'll find it's around 50cm of wire coiled up. It's electrically still a quarter wavelength - there's no getting away from physics.

> There are many ways to excite and feed a slot antenna that do not depend on having the two excitation terminals on each side of the slot.

There really aren't.

> Especially if you're doing it off frequency. Any conductor in the near field is going to couple via induction.

This is the sort of magical thinking that led to the enthusiasm for "Pringles can" aerials for 2.4GHz 20-odd years ago, and they sucked for a variety of reasons. They sucked so badly they radiated sideways better than fore-and-aft.

The speed of sound in air at sea level is around 770mph, and I got 1000mph from 18 metres of plane disappearing into the ground in about a single frame of video.

Let's not argue over the approximate nature of "1000mph" given the measurement constraints.

I think it's pretty much a mercy that no-one aboard would have felt a thing in the last couple of dozen milliseconds.

That was probably not when it was the height of a telephone pole above the ground though.

I'm not planning on listening to it. I would expect that happened long before it hit the ground.

Learjet 60 is about 18 metres long. In one frame it's a little above the ground, in the next it's gone up to about halfway between the cockpit glass and the wing roots, and in the next it's gone.

At 30fps, I make that somewhere in the region of 1000mph.

Well, exactly. It's acting as a huge hole, it's not acting in any way as an antenna.

To work as a slot antenna you'd have to have a low impedance feed right into the middle of each side of the hole, and for 144MHz the sides of your PC would need to be about 2.5 metres along each edge.

> most cases have giant holes in the side (case windows) acting as slot antennas.

They won't act as slot antennas unless they are tuned to the frequency you wish to transmit on, and actually electrically connected on each side to your transmitter.

Modems in the olden days used to have LEDs to show traffic directly attached to the TXD and RXD lines coming off the level shifter, and therefore directly showing the presence or absence of a bit stream on the serial port.

With a suitably tightly focused telescope you could pick up the LED blinking and decode the data going over the port.

Putting it beside a Tesla coil would work too, make more noise than the computer does and you'll bury the signal.

Of course, now you've got a Tesla coil in your data centre, which will bring you a whole new set of Interesting Problems to cope with.

It's still a thing. It's a pain in the arse because it uses a carrier on the mains that has harmonics on every HF amateur band, that radiate from your house wiring for a couple of hundred metres.

Some of the sites I look after at work still have modems attached to the incoming electricity meter from a Broadband-over-Power-Line trial about 15 years ago. It wasn't very fast - it was supposed to be 200Mbps but struggled to do 20, and was often more like 2Mbps - and it radiated RF hash everywhere powerlines ran, from about 500kHz to well up into the hundreds of MHz. What eventually killed it in NE Scotland here was it splattered all over marine VHF, in an area with lots of marine traffic like oil platform supply vessels.

TL;DR anything that uses basically RF over unshielded untwisted cables that radiate everywhere is inefficient and antisocial.

This sounds like the panicky adverts from 20-odd years ago "YOUR COMPUTER IS LEAKING YOUR IP ADDRESS!!11!!""2!!2!!"

> That's fine. But I might end up with a system I can actually use. That actually boots.

You already do. What are you trying to run it on, that isn't booting?

Then fork it, and add your own AI slop to it.

But it won't be included upstream.

So actually "pure CSS", and not the "pure.css" library that's so hard to search for? A lot of that looks pretty good!

But no-one wants AI slop in it.

Correct, yes. You can run BeOS apps on 32-bit gcc2 builds.

This is a surprising amount of effort to not break compatibility ;-)

> I wish that there was some edict from KDE Project management telling everyone working on the Plasma desktop to spend a week in Haiku or something.

The other thing is that it says right at the start of the BeOS Book - and this is carried across to Haiku - is that you shouldn't have a spinner or hourglass. It should do *something*, it shouldn't make you wait.

> Mmm. Or improve the OSes themselves.

Haiku specifically does not accept AI-generated code.

I expect if you use AI to explain how to write it and then write it yourself that would be okay.

You need to be able to explain your work without just pasting in what Special Needs Wintermute says.

I'm not sure what that graph is meant to be showing.

Yes, but what browser is it?

What the hell browser is that?

I'm using it but it's such a pain in the arse to find anything else online about it.

It's one of the reasons I'm planning on moving stuff over to Pico.

Or now, I guess, just writing some CSS from scratch, which I hate.

What's your ten second evaluation?

I used to get in trouble doing that because I'd never look at the book.

I'd have finished it, some of them before we'd even be assigned them, and I'd read up the bit we were going to do that day, have my delivery and timing, have my voices all lined up.

Our teacher I think wanted everyone - reading - each - word - at - a - time - like - this, but I couldn't be bothered with that crap. Make the words live! Make the people real!

And now some forty-some years later, I hear my six-year-old reading his books in his bedroom out loud, trying different voices for different characters until he's got one he likes. I'm going to get so many emails from his teacher, aren't I? But I'm not ever going to tell him to stop.