* Posts by bitburp

2 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Dec 2010

Weather forecasters are STILL banging on about 5G clashing with their sensors. As if climate change is a big deal

bitburp

Re: Why not use 4G/5G?

As far as I understand, this has not been explained correctly in the article. Weather satellites detect the presence of water vapour (and other atmospheric gases) by firing microwave signals downwards and detecting what comes back up. Water vapour absorbs radiation at around the frequency of the proposed 5G frequencies (I believe), which is why ground based emissions at the same frequency will completely screw these observations (obviously the signal power reflected back to the satellite is tiny, so the 5G signal would swamp any observation).

Satellite observation is by many orders of magnitude the most useful input to a weather forecast, and removing this observation type, would have a significant decremental effect on the accuracy of the forecast.

Google Cr-48: Inside the Chrome OS 'unstable isotope'

bitburp
WTF?

Why would you buy one?

I cannot understand why anyone would buy one. Hardware-wise, they have pretty much the same components as any other netbook - screen, keyboard, CPU, disk, RAM, so the cost of the machine would be similar. On a standard netbook, you run Linux/Windows and can do the "local" computing you need/want to, and use the "cloud" via Google Chrome or whatever other web browser you like.

So why would you choose to spend the same money and be restricted to doing it all on the cloud?