mwagner - Slashdot User

Submission + - Here's Trump's Plan To Regulate Social Media

Submitted by Esther Schindler on Tuesday July 28, 2020 @04:48PM

Esther Schindler writes: A proposal to make the FCC rewrite a law through administrative rulemaking would threaten small social sites and generate vast amounts of new business for trial lawyers. Expect some of the people who denounced net-neutrality regulations to cheer it on.

Submission + - A new life for old AM broadcast towers

Submitted by Esther Schindler on Thursday April 26, 2018 @04:36PM

Esther Schindler writes: Video may have killed the radio star, but other media certainly make old AM radio towers superfluous. ...Maybe.
As once-loyal listeners tune away, most AM stations are barely holding onto life, slashing staff and budgets as deeply as they can while struggling to find a return to profitability. Once upon a time, having a broadcast license of any kind was like having a permit to print money. In today’s world, that's no longer true.

But, with 10,000 AM broadcast towers in the United States, stretching high into the sky, there may be an opportunity for wireless carriers who don't want to argue with community opposition from neighborhoods where residents don't want yet another cell tower. The amount of money an AM station owner can pocket by sharing its tower with a wireless partner varies widely, depending on the tower's location, height, and several other factors. But it's certainly more income — and a way to keep "old" technology from becoming obsolete.

Submission + - Coping with Spectre and Meltdown: What sysadmins are doing

Submitted by Esther Schindler on Monday February 19, 2018 @07:20PM

Esther Schindler writes: In technical terms, Spectre and Meltdown are a security pain in the butt. In day-to-day terms, though, they're a serious distraction. Before you left on the holiday break, after all, you had a nice sensible To Do list for the projects you wanted to tackle after the new year.

Ha ha ha.

Instead, sysadmins have spent their time trying to keep up with the nature of the problem and its fixes (will it REALLY slow down computers that much? how can you tell that to the users?), and apply patches. Or, more specifically:
Ron, an IT admin, summarizes the situation succinctly: “More like applied, applied another, removed, I think re-applied, I give up, and have no clue where I am anymore.”

Feel like you're alone? Here's what other sysadmins have done so far, as well as their current plans and long-term strategy, not to mention how to communicate progress to management.

Submission + - Data science and the search for MH370

Submitted by Esther Schindler on Monday October 23, 2017 @09:03PM

Esther Schindler writes: How often are mathematicians heroes? Here's an example where scientists are... not exactly saving the day. But employing technology for good, certainly.

In the absence of physical evidence, scientists are employing powerful computational tools to attempt to solve the greatest aviation mystery of our time: the disappearance of flight MH370.

For example:
A DSTG team led by mathematician Dr. Neil Gordon set about developing a new technique to extract a path from a subset of the Inmarsat data called the Burst Timing Offset (BTO). This measured how quickly the aircraft responded each time the satellite pinged it, and was used to determine the distance between the satellite and the plane. Investigators used these calculations to draw a set of rings on the earth’s surface.

...The DSTG used its computers to generate a huge number of possible routes and then test them to see which best fit the observed data. Their endpoints were pooled to generate a probabilistic “heat map” of the plane’s most likely resting places using a technique called Bayesian analysis. These calculations allowed the DSTG team to draw a box 400 miles long and 70 miles across, which contained about 90 percent of the total probability distribution.

Cool stuff, even if we still don't know where the plane ended up.

Submission + - High-altitude drones are the future of Internet broadband (lightreading.com)

Submitted by mwagner on Tuesday October 21, 2014 @11:04AM

mwagner writes: Skynet is coming. But not like in the movie: The future of communications is high-altitude solar-powered drones, flying 13 miles above the ground, running microwave wireless equipment, delivering broadband to the whole planet. This technology will replace satellites, fiber, and copper, and fundamentally change the broadband industry. Call it Skynet, after the antagonist in the Terminator movies. It's coming in about 20 years — the same amount of time between Arthur C. Clarke's predicting the geosynchronous satellite and their reality as a commercial business. "Several important technology milestones need to be reached along the way. The drones that will make up Skynet have a lot more in common with satellites than the flippy-flappy helicopter drone thingies that the popular press is fixated on right now. They’re really effing BIG, for one thing. And, like satellites, they go up, and stay up, pretty much indefinitely. For that to happen, we need two things: lighter, higher-capacity wireless gear; and reliable, hyper-efficient solar tech."

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