If you took a picture of the Sun at the same time each day, would it remain in the same position? The answer is no, and the shape traced out by the Sun over the course of a year is called an analemma. The Sun's apparent shift is caused by the Earth's motion around the Sun when combined with the tilt of the Earth's rotation axis. The Sun will appear at its highest point of the analemma during summer and at its lowest during winter. Today, the Winter Solstice day in Earth's northern hemisphere, the Sun is at the bottom of the analemma. Analemmas created from different latitudes would appear at least slightly different, as well as analemmas created at a different time each day. This particular analemma was built up by 46 separate Sun photographs taken during 2003 in Athens, Greece. Pictured in the foreground of this composite image are pillars called the Porch of Maidens, part of the ancient Erechtheum which was completed in 407 BC.

The animated motion of the analemma sun below was constructed from the original film negative containing the 46 single exposures. Its purpose is to illustrate the wandering motion of the sun during twelve months and whose net motion is described by the analemma curve or "figure eight". The bottom apex point represents winter solstice whereas the first solar disk to the immediate upper-left is the start of January and where we observe the gradual and steady increase in the sun's altitude from day-to-day. This increase continues into February and March and, by mid-April, we have reached the cross-over point between the two loops. The sun continues its steady rise across local skies but is now on the right portion of the upper loop and which peaks at the apex point of the upper loop on summer solstice. It is at this point that the sun will now start another gradual and steady pace but this time with declining altitude and where, during July and August, it will traverse the left side of the upper loop. We reach the cross-over point once again but this time at the end of August with the sun now losing altitude at a greater pace while it is now on the right side of the lower loop and which will climax with the winter solstice and the apex point once again.

Incredible as it may sound, only seven times has someone ever managed to successfully image the solar analemma as a multi-exposure on a single piece of film. An analemma is basically the figure "8" loop that results when one observes the position of the sun at the same time during the day over the course of a year. As a result of the earth's tilt about its axis (23.5°) and its elliptical orbit about the sun, the location of the sun is not constant from day to day when observed at the same time on each day over a period of twelve months. Furthermore, this loop will be inclined at different angles depending on one's geographical latitude.

As suggested by the relatively few number of successfully completed analemmas (seven total including the pioneering photo in 1979), the imaging of the sun over local skies during the course of twelve months is considered one of the most difficult and demanding astronomical phenomena to image. The analemma presented below is one of TEN analemmas completed during a marathon started in 2001 in an attempt to document the complete range of analemmas from sunrise to sunset (see here). It is further unique as it represents the fifth of eight analemmas ever imaged during a single calendar year and also the fifth analemma ever imaged in Greece.

Note: For an animation involving the analemma at 13:00:00 UT+2 and which beautifully documents the actual motion of the sun during twelve consecutive months when observed at precisely 13:00:00 UT+2, please see the example here.

Note: As noted elsewhere, more men have walked on the moon than have successfully photographed the analemma (see S&T, Dec/2003: 73).

Regardless, I'll return to the one big question that is most relevant now. In Ocasio-Cortez's magic world, who runs Gaza if a ceasefire is agreed upon? She'll never say, and she'll never be put in a position to say.

An error as small as a single flipped memory bit is all it takes to expose a private key. //

Martin Blank Ars Tribunus Militum

gromett said:
I have read it twice and am still not entirely clear.
Does this affect OpenSSH? As I read it the answer is no?

As happens often in cryptographic attacks that at least start out as implementation-specific, the likely answer is "it is not currently known to affect other implementations." Cryptographic techniques always get cheaper, never more expensive, and it is difficult to guarantee that other implementations are not vulnerable through variations of this attack. //

bobo bobo said:
A link in this article, to a Wikipedia page on Man In the Middle attacks, is labeled as a "malory in the middle" attack. But, um, the Wikipedia page does not use the term "malory". I am confused by use of the word "malory".

Typo? Or am I missing something?
It's a less common use, but it's part of the movement in the IT industry to move away from sensitive terms (e.g., master/slave becoming primary/secondary or similar). I've also heard monster-in-the-middle and monkey-in-the-middle, but really, there are no suggested terms that roll off the tongue the way man-in-the-middle does while keeping the MitM shorthand. //

FabiusCunctator Ars Scholae Palatinae

The vulnerability occurs when there are errors during the signature generation that takes place when a client and server are establishing a connection. It affects only keys using the RSA cryptographic algorithm, which the researchers found in roughly a third of the SSH signatures they examined.

A good reason to not use RSA keys if possible. I configure all of my ssh setups to use ED25519 keys by default, with a fallback to RSA if ED25519 support is not available.

You can generate an ED25519 key using the standard OpenSSH package by doing:

 ssh-keygen -t ed25519

That will generate two files in your ssh key directory ('~/.ssh/' by default): 'id_ed25519' and 'id_ed25519.pub'. The first is your private key (keep it close!), while the second is your public key. Add that to the public key file you deploy to remote servers, and (where supported *) your logins will then use the new ED25519 keypair in preference to RSA ones.

• The 'where supported' caveats are important. While many if not most ssh implementations today (including OpenSSH) support ED25519 keys, there are still a few around that don't. Hence, it's a good idea to maintain both ED25519 and RSA keys and include both in your public key lists. If an implementation does not support ED25519, it will just ignore those keys and use RSA. //

In the documentary above, one government estimate shows that if the power were to remain off in the United States due to its inability to replace and repair the damage done to the grid, 90 percent of the population could die off in one year. //

DaveM Romeg
9 hours ago edited
btw- over the years there have been various explanation.
At one time in the 70's and 80's
(when climate change "experts" predicted we were entering a new Ice Age ) the lack of detection of electron neutrinos from the Sun led to a hypothesis that there were some changes in the Solar Core fusion rate which could lead to ice ages. That one was discarded when it was discovered that electron neutrinos can decay into tau and muon neutrinos. Suddenly those missing neutrinos were no longer missing.
Before that it had been hypothesized that periodic oscillations in Earth's orbit could lead to both cold and warm periods.

The reality is that the science of climate is immature as a science. There's a huge amount of data but much of it is very low quality data.

In the world of science the sin qua non of any hypothesis is it's ability to make testable conclusions. The fact that revery single hypothesis of climate change has failed that fundamental test should have told the scientific community that the underlying theories about climate are just plain wrong. More importantly- a re-assessment should have told them that that they are making a classical mistake- instead of being led to the conclusion by the data they are starting with the conclusion and working backwards. That leads to the cherry-picking of data.

Were I a climate scientist (I'm not nor do I play one on TV) I would wonder why these hypothesis are failing. After all they are based on a sound understanding of the physics involved. There are obviously factors influencing climate that are critically important but very poorly understood. What are those factors? I haven't a clue. But then -if we knew all the answers there wouldn't be much point in studying it would there?

A famous case was a study of tree rings which proved climate change. The problem was the ring data was all over the place and the researcher threw out in excess of 90+ percent of the tree ring data. He then tried to use the remaining few percent of data to prove a conclusion. The proper scientific conclusion was that tree ring data he was using was not a valid predictor of climate. A real scientist would have seen a new line of enquiry open. Why was there such variation in a group of trees that shared the same climate and overall environmental conditions? But that would have required him to admit he didn't have a clue what was happening.

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Even though Microsoft reimplemented the new Windows 11 taskbar from scratch as was mentioned in the previous blog post, the old taskbar code was left beside the new one, and there are several ways to activate it. Here is a great summary of the options by Gaurav, but I’ll just mention the steps that worked for me:

• Install and configure ExplorerPatcher for Windows 11, a great project by Valentin-Gabriel Radu which brings back the old taskbar on Windows 11, and fixes some of the quirks that have to be fixed as a result.
• Install the latest beta version of 7+ Taskbar Tweaker (non-beta support will follow soon, keep reading for details).
• Enjoy Windows 11 with the good old taskbar tweaked to your taste.

Update (October 22): Windows 11 with Windows 10’s taskbar is fully supported starting with 7+ Taskbar Tweaker v5.12.

Plus, the size of Wales in cubic furlongs

The venerable PDP-11 minicomputer is still spry to this day, powering GE nuclear power-plant robots - and will do so for another 37 years.

That's right: PDP-11 assembler coders are hard to find, but the nuclear industry is planning on keeping the 16-bit machines ticking over until 2050 – long enough for a couple of generations of programmers to come and go.

Now that you've cleaned up the coffee spills and finished laughing, take a look here, at Vintage Computer forums, where GE's Chris Issel has resorted to seek assembly programmers for the 1970s tech.

Wednesday 19th June 2013 08:28 GMT
John Smith 19Gold badge
Coat
PDP 11 odds and ends.
The PDP 11 (like the PARC Alto) had a main processor built from standard 4 bit TTL "ALU" parts and their companion "register file." So 2nd, 3rd,4th sourced. I'm not sure how many mfg still list them on their available list in the old standard 0.1" pin spacing.

El Reg ran a story that Chorus (formerly British Steel) ran them for controlling all sorts of bits of their rolling mills but I can't recall if they are

I think the core role for this task is the refueling robots for the CANDU reactors. CANDU allows "on load" refuelling. The robots work in pairs locked onto each end of the pressurized pipes that carry the fuel and heavy water coolant/moderator. They then pressurize their internal storage areas, open the ends and one pushes new fuel bundles in while the other stores the old ones, before sealing the ends. However CANDU have been working on new designs with different fuel mixes (CANDU's special sauce (C Lewis Page) is that it's run with unenriched Uranium, which is much cheaper and does not need a bomb making enrichment facility) and new fuel bundle geometries, so time for a software upgrade.

And 128 users on a PDP 11/70. Certain customers ran bespoke OSes in the early 90s that could get 300+ when VMS could only support about less than 20 on the same spec.

Note for embedded use this is likely to be RSX rather than VMS, which also hosted the ICI developed RTL/2, which was partly what hosted the BBC CEEFAX service for decades.

Yes, it's an anorak.. //

Wednesday 19th June 2013 18:20 GMT
Jamie JonesSilver badge
Thumb Up
Who's laughing?
I feel much better knowing this.

What is the alternative? Buggy software written by the "'Have you tried switching it off and on again" generation?

RSX11M - Dave Cutler
Anyone who read the RSX11M sources (driver writers especially) realised that Dave Cutler was a very very good programmer long before he worked on VMS and later Windows NT. He managed to get a multiuser protected general purpose operating system to work with a minimum memory footprint of under 32kbytes on machines with about the same CPU power as the chip on a credit card. (A 96kByte PDP 11/40 (1/3 mip) with 2 RK05 disks (2.4Mbyte each) could support 2 concurrent programmers - a PDP 11/70 (1 mip) with 1Mbyte and 2 RM03 disk packs (65Mbyte each) could support 10 or more.) During the many years that the CEGB used PDP-11 computers with RSX11M, I did not hear of a single OS failure that was not caused by a hardware fault - I wish that current systems were as good. //

Wednesday 19th June 2013 15:09 GMT
annodomini2
Reply Icon
FAIL
Re: there are alternatives
They would never redesign the system, if the system has issues, they are known and fixes are well known.

Changing the system design introduces potential risks and unknowns into the system.

It's not about Zero failure, it's about safe and predictable failure. //

Wednesday 19th June 2013 07:53 GMT
Bob Dunlop
Hey I was taught assembler programming using a pdp11 .

After it's nice clean structure, the mess that was 8086 code came as quite a shock.

Wednesday 19th June 2013 20:24 GMT
bscottm
Reply Icon
Re: It just costs money
It's not the GHz clock cycle that is the problem. It's the smaller feature size of the transistors that increases the single event upset (SEU) rate. Yes, the two are inter-related, but one could conceivably build multi-core, chip symmetric multiprocessors based on the PDP-11 at today's feature sizes and not have GHz clock cycle times (and still end up with significant SEU rates.)

A couple of years ago, a NASA/JPL scientist pointed out that the alpha particles (helium nuclei) from lead solder were causing interesting issues with current x86_64 I/O pins -- radiation issues on commodity hardware.

STATUS OF U.S. NUCLEAR OUTAGES

Every morning, each nuclear electricity generator in the United States reports its operating status to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The NRC compiles this information in its Power Reactor Status Report, and we present that information in interactive visualizations on our Status of Nuclear Outages page. Our analysis tool combines the NRC daily status with data gathered from our Annual Electric Generator Report and Monthly Update to the Annual Electric Generator Report. The page includes two maps showing the capacity and outage status of U.S. nuclear plants.

STATUS OF U.S. NUCLEAR OUTAGES

To some observers, the plan’s collapse also raises questions about the feasibility of other planned advanced reactors, meant to provide clean energy with fewer drawbacks than existing reactors. NuScale’s was the most conventional of the designs, and the closest to construction. “There’s plenty of reasons to think [the other projects] are going to be even more difficult and expensive,” says Edwin Lyman, a physicist and director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists. //

Jacopo Buongiorno, a nuclear engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says the NuScale design has an Achilles’ heel. Each reactor’s core resides within a double-walled steel cylinder, with a vacuum between the walls to keep heat from leaking out. The reactor modules sit in a big pool of water, which in an emergency can flood into the vacuum space around a reactor to prevent it overheating. Compared with a conventional reactor’s building, the pool requires more reinforced concrete, the price of which has soared, Buongiorno says. “In terms of tons of reinforced concrete per megawatt of power, NuScale’s design is off the chart.” //

Buongiorno says he wouldn’t read NuScale’s failure as a verdict on all advanced reactor designs. “I would steer clear of broad-stroke comments in terms of cost,” he says. Baker says he has no doubt that the country needs new nuclear plants to supplement the fluctuating supply of power from wind and solar. “To achieve the nation’s decarbonization goals, it’s got to happen.”

While arguing against the kill-switch provision, Rep. Massie referred to it “a backseat driver” for American drivers. During an appearance with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, he laid out the issues with the requirement.

People said I’m a conspiracy theorist for saying this is in the legislation, but I actually had to read the Democrats the bill that they passed two years ago. They passed this in 2021 as part of a 1,039-page bill to require that your car can monitor your driving performance and if it thinks you are not driving well, it could disable your vehicle. //

The provision is included in Section 24220 and mandates that all cars manufactured after 2026 would have to feature the kill-switch. Massie’s amendment would have removed this provision, but it was defeated by a 229 to 201 vote. Interestingly enough, 19 Republicans voted to keep the kill-switch requirement in the legislation. //

I’m reminded of Benjamin Franklin’s famous line: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” This requirement almost perfectly embodies Franklin’s warning and presents a deceptive trade-off: Allow the government to have control over your car in exchange for possibly saving a few lives from drunk driving. //

stickdude90
a day ago
Great way to make sure you don't drive more than your allotted mileage each week - to save the environment, of course...

What he did was contribute to the risks to not only Israelis but Americans, because it's coming to a theater near you. If Hamas is not stopped in its tracks from doing the terrorist acts, they will bring them to the United States. //

Barack Obama, ever the smug globalist, and ever the cheerleader for the Palestinians, is never going to change his Israel-blaming stripes. Thankfully, Bibi Netanyahu and the Israeli people are no longer affected by his actions or rhetoric.

Steve Herman
@W7VOA
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WSJ — Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi met with CIA Director William Burns and rejected a proposal for the North African country to manage security in the Gaza Strip until the Palestinian Authority can take over after Hamas’ defeat. …
journa.host
Steve Herman (@w7voa@journa.host)
4:50 PM · Nov 8, 2023 //

Daniel DePetris
@DanDePetris
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Interesting. Ehud Barak once approached Hosni Mubarak and basically asked him if the Arab states would be able to take over Gaza once Hamas was crushed, perhaps for a short 3-6 month period.

Mubarak’s response: Gaza is your problem.
5:08 PM · Nov 8, 2023