Watts Up With That?

I haven’t written about Vista for awhile, so I’m overdue. From Slashdot:

“At the 2008 RSA security conference, Microsoft’s David Cross was quoted as saying, ‘The reason we put UAC into the platform was ‘to annoy users. I’m serious.’ The logic behind this statement is that it should encourage application vendors to eliminate as many unnecessary privilege escalations as possible by causing users to complain about all the UAC ‘Cancel or Allow’ prompts.

Of course, they probably didn’t expect that Microsoft would instead get most of the complaints for training users to ignore meaningless security warnings.”

Microsoft is a clueless about people’s needs as our government is now.

HadCRUT global numbers are out, and is at 0.43°C, still lower than the GISS number of 0.67°C.

Click for a larger image

Once again Jim Hansen’s NASA GISS is the highest global anomaly:

RSS (satellite)
2008 1 -0.070
2008 2 -0.002
2008 3   0.079

UAH (satellite)
2008    1  -0.046  
2008    2    0.020
2008    3    0.094

HadCRUT (surface, land-ocean)

2008/01  0.056 
2008/02  0.187 
2008/03  0.430

GISS (surface, land-ocean, polar estimates)
Year      Jan  Feb  Mar 
2008    .12   .26   .67

As I’ve been noting regularly, Solar cycle 24 is late, and has produced only one spot this year, on January 4th. Since then, nothing, except a small parade of near equatorial oriented cycle 23 spots.

Now we see the faint beginnings of a spot at high latitude, with proper magnetic polarity.

Click for a LARGE image from SOHO

As you can see in the SOHO MDI image above, the spot is faint, and has not quite coalesced yet. It shows up far better on the SOHO magnetogram image. I’ve annotated and enhanced the image so the the polarity is identified and the relevant area magnified:

As you can see while the latitude is high and almost identical in latitude to the January 4th cycle 24 spot, it still hasn’t formed up to be a true sunspot. It remains simply a disturbed magnetic region.

A lot of people will be watching this “sorta spot”. I wonder if they’ll have the SOHO MDI image up on the big monitors for betting at sportsbooks in Las Vegas?