Well thanks, I could have done with this article yesterday, instead of chasing round the office rolling back updates.
Posts by Alister
4260 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2010
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Patch blues-day: Microsoft yanks code after some PCs are rendered super secure (and unbootable) following update
Welcome your new ancestor to the Homo family tree; boffins have discovered a new tiny species of human
London's Metropolitan Police arrest Julian Assange
IBM bid to unmask age discrimination whistleblower goes down in flames
Brit hacker jailed for strapping ransomware to smut site ad networks
MoD plonks down £2m on table in exchange for anti-drone tech ideas
Probe-on-asteroid violence as Japan's Hayabusa2 chucks screaming chunk of base metal at Ryugu
Ethiopia sits on 737 Max report but says pilots followed Boeing drills
An addendum to the above.
On Pprune, figures have been posted regarding the manual trim wheels:
it takes 250 full revolutions of the trim wheel to go from full nose-down to full nose-up deflection of the stabiliser, so to correct the MCAS trim input, a maximum of 125 full revolutions would be required. The wheel is not free spinning, so to make one full revolution requires two or possibly three hand movements by the pilots.
So, if we say that to make a single full revolution of the trim wheel requires 2 seconds, then to adjust to neutral trim from full nose-down deflection would take 3 minutes of constant winding, whilst at the same time trying to keep full back pressure on the yoke.
The crew were presented with all sorts of conflicting warnings, including airspeed warnings, the stick-shaker-stall warning, an Anti-Ice warning and so on.
They did identify, amongst all that, that they were in a runaway stab trim situation, and did disable the electronic trim (and MCAS).
However, disabling the trim does not return it to normal, it just stops any further automatic trim inputs from moving the stabiliser, and the only way to get the aircraft back into trim is to use the manual trim wheels, which are much lower geared than the electronic version.
Additionally, the aerodynamic forces on the stabiliser at the speed the aircraft was travelling appear to have made the manual trim almost impossible to move. Given that the crew were already having to pull back on the yokes with considerable force to counteract the nose-down attitude, they were unable to correct the trim manually.
It appears that they may have then re-enabled the electronic trim to try and use the yoke-mounted trim buttons, but then MCAS kicked in and added further nose-down trim, sealing their fate.
Your interpretation is flawed, and, I feel, aimed at discrediting the pilots.
Despite all the conflicting wanings they were getting, and the stick-shaker operating, they managed to correctly identify the problem as runaway stab trim, and followed the correct procedure to correct it, a procedure which includes the instruction to re-enable the electric trim to try and recover the aircraft in the event that the manual trim is unsuccessful. It appears that they didn't fully appreciate that the MCAS would dump a load more AND on them when they did that.
If they are struggling to get the aircraft into a climb, pulling back on the throttles would not be any pilots' first thought.
Hello, tech support? Yes, I've run out of desk... Yes, DESK... space
Who needs foreign servers? Researchers say the USA is doing a fine job of harboring its own crimeware flingers
Re: This is not exactly news
The overwhelming majority of traffic that we see from TOR exit nodes is malicious, and I wouldn't be doing my job properly if I just let it continue to fill up the logs, just on the off-chance that there might be the occasional legitimate user, so we block them.
We don't, yet, block most VPS endpoints, but that's because the malicious traffic is quite low from them. If it increased to silly levels, I'd block them too.
Don't misunderstand: we don't deliberately go and get a list of TOR exit nodes and pre-emptively block them all at once, but we run fail2ban, and other commercial IDP products, and we just regularly review the lists of blocked IPs, but it soon becomes apparent that a lot of them are TOR nodes.
Amazon consumer biz celebrates ridding itself of last Oracle database with tame staff party... and a Big Red piñata
Hands up who can tell me which pupil details transfer system has glitched. Yes, Capita's
The common transfer files (CTF) mechanism is used to send children's information between primary and secondary schools for moving pupils and other ad-hoc transfers.
Capita went on to say that schools shouldn't use this to share pupil and contact details with other schools...
Yeah, you know that system for transferring pupil details, well, please don't use it for transferring pupil details, it's not designed for it...
Robo-BOFH giant Park Place Technologies slurps Brit IT biz MCSA
UK taxman plans to, er, Crown Hosting boss. Who'll take £115k to be its champion in HMRC?
Are you sure you've got a floppy disk stuck in the drive? Or is it 100 lodged in the chassis?
Re: If it fits...
20 years ago I used to work on the Ambulance service, and we got a 999 call to a house with the report "young child trapped". When we got there, we walked in and found a toddler standing with their hand stuck in the slot of a front-loading VCR, and the mother having hysterics on the couch.
The child had stuck their hand in the slot, and somehow also pressed the "eject" button, so the tape mechanism had ridden up, trapping their hand. It was a simple matter to get a finger in the slot and press the loaded tape down, and remove the toddler's hand.
We were discussing afterwards what would have happened if they'd called the Fire service and not us, the consensus was the VCR would have been cut to pieces... :)
Take that, America! Huawei flips Trump & Co the bird after reporting double-digit % rise in sales and profit
BOFH: Tick tick BOOM. It's B-day! No we're not eating Brussels flouts...
Boffins may have found something more salty than Brexit Brits' tears this week: Underground pools of water on Mars
IT meltdown bank TSB: It's as good a week as any to announce we're taking back control
Microsoft's corporate veep for enterprise puts the boot into boot times
Re: Windows is the small part of the problem
I'd pay and extra 500$ a box and switch server vendors just for a BIOS that POSTs about as fast as my desktops do.
The problem with servers is they usually have RAID BIOSs and so on to initialise and boot, which take a while. But I'm not sure I'd be happy with a RAID controller that didn't check for volume consistency etc before handing it over to the OS.