This article is SO light on details and substance that I am amazed that it was posted. Instrument flight is difficult, yes, HOWEVER, current guages provide the experiences instrument pilot with a lot of useful information.
A major concern of mine would be that the system designers replace the feedback that the old instruments provide with something that is easier to interpret, but is missing some information content that an experienced pilot would get from the traditional AI,ASI,HI,VSI + Radio Nav / GPS of today.
Flight directors and EFIS displays are excellent today, and, the new large artificial horizon display that can been seen in the Cirrus Designs SR22 upgrade avionics, along with the traditional instrument layout (even if electronic) is a major boon to safety and reliablilty. This also has the advantage of positive transfer of training. Something that the article's system might not have, but who can tell? There wasn't a ton of information in that fluffy article.
People interested in this topic would do well to search for info on the FAA Alaska projects and 'highway in sky' instrument display systems that have been prototyped over the last few years.
As for people who are concerned about failure. Rest assured that even today, aircraft of all sizes that are certified for instrument flight have redundant gauges and systems. Even a B777 has a simple mechanical aritificial horizon and wet-compass hidden in with the electronic instruments.
Photos and Poetry from Pripyat. The worker's town.
on
Putting A Lid On Chernobyl
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I stumbled (ok Googled) across some interesting and moving photos from Pripyat, the town where the Chernobyl workers were housed. Shocking and worth a read / look.
I think all the people proposing a rate limited iptables / packet filter solution are on the right track, but missing a bigger part of the problem .
You want to be able to stop those packets from hitting your 384Kbps xDSL line. Otherwise, you are not only losing processing time dealing with the junk; you are having to give up a fraction of your bandwidth too.
Admittedly, it isn't a large chunk of your bandwidth. Likely around 3/4 - 1.0 %. However, it won't take much to get out of control.
This is where the real problem lies, and; xDSL service providers seldom are willing to route or modify the feeds they send clients. In fact, they frequently don't have the infrastructure for it at all.
That's too bad. However, one can argue that you have to work in an environment that really doesn't promote a switch. This isn't Apple's fault. As always, the right tool for the right job.
The latest Cryptogram has more links on this...
Shamelessly ripped from the latest.
Possible Palladium patents from Microsoft:
6,330,670 Digital rights management operating system
6,327,652 Loading and identifying a digital rights management operating system
You can probably find others pending in Europe, where you have to disclose upon filing.
At a panel on Palladium at the USENIX Security Conference in August, Microsoft representatives claimed that there was no way Palladium could be used to enforce Digital Rights Management. In response, Lucky Green invented a bunch of ways Palladium could be used to enforce DRM and then filed for a patent.
I worked for many years as a contractor at a large US-based defense company. They make lots of neat useful things, and some nasty things.
One thing was always stressed, in the hardware departments, in the software departments, in the finance departments, wherever. If you go into a lab, you must have ESD training. At least 3 levels of training existed. Level 1 was little more than awareness training. If something had an ESD warning label, stay clear of it. Don't touch. Etc. Why? The training also emphasized the costs associated with ESD damage to components. A great deal of effort was spent making sure that we all understood that ESD damage to components might not be visible or even detectable at test / QA time, HOWEVER, in the field, the defect rate over time was dramatically lower when ESD controls were in place on the assembly and test / QA lines. This was serious stuff, the examples ranged from deployed PCs going inop after years of reliable service up to air-to-air missiles not functioning due to static damage. In the end, a very large sum of money was spent investigating the effects of ESD on the reliability of components in the field and it was determined that the benefits far out paced the costs of training everyone and taking precautions in the labs.
I now work somewhere much smaller and have a really hard time getting people to believe that ESD is real. I even had to fight a bit to ESD mats at the workstations where we do assembly.
There are a lot of myths and misperceptions surrounding ESD incidents, and I think that people would be well served by understanding that damange to electronic devices is not either fatal or non-fatal. A FET device might have it's gate region severely weakened by an ESD incident, but it would appear to function normally for an extended period of time. Perhaps the thermal efficiency has been compromised because the gate has partially broken down. The added thermal stress on the part over time will lead to early failure. The reason, naively, would look like a bum part or a thermal problem. The ESD problems don't always reach out and slap you across the face with a sign that says: "Zapped by poor assembly / handling techniques".
Yeah, I know that, but I also know these things are virtually indestructible and are really easy to build. Anyone who can build a switching power supply wouldn't be asking how to change 12V to 5V on slashdot, and I wouldn't reccomend building a switching power supply as a "starter" electronics project.
True enough. I guess I overlooked that part.
From my experience the parts don't actually completely stop supplying voltage. They just stop regulating, and if that means a 1 volt increase to your stuff (its a battery, so there's not going to be a lot of noise on the line), I doubt you need to worry about it.:-) And if you do, stop buying such junk!
True enough, thinking back (ok, way back) I think my first project was a power supply based around 78XX parts and a selector switch. That is a long way from a switching supply.
You really don't want to use an LM317 part. This is a linear regulator and a good chuck of your power budget will be spent heating this part up. Also, it will not supply 12V very nicely. Linear regs need a source voltage somewhat above the target output voltage. The drop-out voltage for this part is always above 1.0V and can even reach 2.5V in some cases. (See the PDF).
Digital Trust Model Not Appropriate
on
Haiku vs Spam
·
· Score: 1
Perhaps this isn't the right way to go at all. The spam problem will effectively go away if people would adopt secure email. That is, if everyone would digitally sign their email and the certification authorities were somehow trusted enough to not hand out false credentials. Then, it becomes a simple case of ignoring all unsigned / unauthenticatated email. Businesses could still spam, but you'd know it was commercial in nature and better yet, who was responsible.
Imagine that? Accountability in email. How novel.
I think a proprietary scheme that relies on court enforcement is just going to be a losing proposition in the long run.
The current laws do not protect security or privacy...
Well, there is a flaw in the laws regarding IP networks.
...nor do they allow law enforcement access for wiretaps
Again, I'd say this is a flaw in the law.
The article points out that older analog telephone lines are covered by laws that prevent people from tapping the lines unless it is someone with the authority and authorization to do so. The article makes it look like the laws regarding VoIP are less advanced, and desperately need updated.
The laws for VoIP are the same. The problem is that the user agents (phones) are prone to initiating direct UA-UA media streams. Such a media stream is not easily tapped and routed to law enforcement officials.
Legal things aside, I would have thought that by now, in this day and age, people would consider security when providing a new service that runs over a computer network. I'm dissapointed in the comapnies who have disregarded security here.
VoIP is currently early-stage, however, the standards are definately in place and/or maturing to support full encryption and this aspect of the protocol is certainly being taken seriously. Check out RFC3261 for a discussion on SIP and the security measures that are being proposed.
Is there no easy way to make it all tunnel through SSH?
Not the media. The media streams (presently) are mostly UDP streams. This will change once the end-to-end encryption has been implemented by the proxy and UA manufacturers.
It's worth pointing out whether it is tasteful or not is one thing, but the fact is that legislation make is the obligation of the service provider to tap and provide access to a subscriber's calls when the appropriate procedures are followed by law enforcement officials.
The CALEA hurddle, as it is starting to be known in the VoIP world, has solutions, some of them good. Typically the place where you are interested in maintaining your internal network VoIP security or gating control is a good place to implement a CALEA solution too.
Many of the current VoIP deployments today are not using the security features that you might expect to see. In large, this is because the standard itself is maturing and the manner in which security will be implemented is still under investigation. In the case of SIP, the article points out that although the payload (voice) might be encrypted, the signalling isn't. This is not entirely true. One thing that SIP permits is to tunnel SIP as a payload within SIP. The external session serves only as a routing mechanism for the fully encrypted 'real' signaling session contained within. These mechanisms are just completing peer review and implementors are just wrapping their heads around it all. One thing is for sure; unlike protocols that have preceeded them, SIP and it's designers are taking security very seriously. How else could they consider using SIP as an integral part of 3GPP and/or it's use for inter-carrier peering.
Sure, the protocol itself may have exposure issues, and problems with NAT/PAT devices, but there are companies on the market that are addressing these issues as they arise.
Flat spins, such as the one depicted in "Top Gun", can indeed be a problem because the aircract lacks rudder authority in that situation, and rudder is important to stall recovery.
Er perhaps you mean spin, or incipient spin.
In an aeroplane where the thrust component is inline with the CG and the aerodynamic centre of pressure, such that there is no rotational (yaw) moment generated by the powerplant, there would be no need for rudder when recovering from a co-ordinated stall. A spin however, where you are wishing to neutralise the rotational component before recovering the stall, you'd need rudder authority. ( A spin is an asymetric stall where one wing is generating more lift than the other, causing a rotational moment about the yaw axis. -- not entirely correct, but more correct than not.;-) )
Although I cannot find a specific-cool link at their site, the Human Performance Lab in the Department of Kinesthetics has been doing some mightly cool motion capture and analysis of atheletes, normal people and people with physical limitations for years. Very cool Sun based motion tracking system. My climbing partner in Uni used to be the technician for the capture / analysis systems. They were SPARC systems at the time, from sun.
As other posters have mentioned, motion capture and motion synthesis tend to be very different problems, although in an end product (if it is a rendering) may contain elements of both.
Alias' tools still tend to be some of the better products out there for synthesis. If you are serious about capture, I know that the U of C department would at least be a starting place for software sources. I know that it wasn't an inexpensive setup.
The MIT 6.270 project course has been running for a long time. When I was an undergrad, they has a very cool design for a Motorola 68HC11 based SBC that was perfect for motor interfacing and various small scale projects. These days, the same architect (Fred Martin) has a modernised version of the original 6.270 SBC available at
HandyBoard.com
and there are variants of the original SBC with it's documentation here.
Other posters who suggest that you do some studying are not unwise. Digital logic is straightforward when you have a background in combinatorial logic and a few other concepts up to about 25MHz. Designs with that level of clock speed can easily be wire-wrapped. Beyond that, you are going to have to start considering high-speed design issues when you route your boards.
One of the most rewarding things that I did as an undergrad was design my own SBC around a Motorola 68HC11 to run the mechanics for a 3-D scanning system that interfaced to an SGI workstation.
I really think that if this interests you, you should pursue it . The current 'state of the hobby' is now so advanced that it is somewhat mind numbing what can be done with some FPGAs and some software to layout a PCB.
The Motorola Dragonball family (or it's decendants) are an excellent 68000 core family of chips that are easy to use and you can design a modestly useful machine around them with a classic buss / memory mapped IO architecture without working up too much of a sweat.
Vancouver International Airport (YVR) has had a Nokia system installed for some time now. It works very well and rates have varied from free (on trials) to 9.95$ CDN / day (ISTR). Hopefully this sort of thing will catch on because it is a very nice service to have while you wait for your flight. Especially these days, where you are potentially spending several hours at the airport prior to your flight.
This has been floating around on other tech lists for a while. There is a descent article on HP'ssite about the technology and their envisioned application
here.
Dialogic Corp makes excellent hardware for this.
on
Build Your Own Phone Tree?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You might see if you can get a hold of a Dialogic Board.
See my previous posting about a system I implemented
here . The company that offered the dial-out product no longer produces interactive outgoing voice systems or I would include a link here.
Re:In response to others...
on
Flying on Mars
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Sounds like another potential use for carbon nanotubes. After all, if they're strong enough to build a space elevator (see earlier/. article) they're probably strong enough to make a helicopter, right?
A quick disclaimer. I am not a physisict, however, I am a pilot.:)
The problem isn't with the strength of the blades so much as it is with the rotor tip (linear) speed.
Long before we design a rotor that is strong enough to do this, the tips of said rotor will exceed the speed of sound on Mars at whatever density altitude you are at. The onset of compressibility effects and eventually shock wave propagation will adversely affect the lift generated by the rotor.
More likely would be a LARGE, slow, rotor. This is where the nano-tube technologies might have an opportunity to shine.
It might just be me, but in my former experience being a SysAdmin for several junior oil companies, one thing really stood out in the IT and infrastructure areas: These people were extra conservative.
Whereas the exploration group was running on really nice (for the time) new SGI machines, the production group was being more reserved with Sparc/SUN solutions and the accounting department was positively in the dark ages with an old AS/400 mainframe. It was considered quite radical when they migrated to a bunch of AIX boxes and they were terrified to do it.
Don't misunderstand me, I'd love to see the adoption of linux and open-source solutions in this arena, but I feel that this is likely an area that will meet with substantial resistance.
I am using a very simliar setup. RH6.2 on a SONY Z505R (the modern one would be the HS or HE I think) with a Motorola L7089 tri-band phone. Works everywhere I've been (UK, Switzerland, Belgium, USA, Canada). No need for a modem either, just IR the phone to the laptop. Not the cheapest solution, but it does work well. Just make sure that you contact your local mobile provider and enable world-wide roaming. Some GSM providers have better roaming agreements than others. Shop around before you sign up if you are planning to roam in North America or Australia. I can't help much with that, since I am in Canada and use FIDO aka Microcell.
Slashdot Mirror
A few comments as a pilot:
This article is SO light on details and substance that I am amazed that it was posted. Instrument flight is difficult, yes, HOWEVER, current guages provide the experiences instrument pilot with a lot of useful information.
A major concern of mine would be that the system designers replace the feedback that the old instruments provide with something that is easier to interpret, but is missing some information content that an experienced pilot would get from the traditional AI,ASI,HI,VSI + Radio Nav / GPS of today.
Flight directors and EFIS displays are excellent today, and, the new large artificial horizon display that can been seen in the Cirrus Designs SR22 upgrade avionics, along with the traditional instrument layout (even if electronic) is a major boon to safety and reliablilty. This also has the advantage of positive transfer of training. Something that the article's system might not have, but who can tell? There wasn't a ton of information in that fluffy article.
People interested in this topic would do well to search for info on the FAA Alaska projects and 'highway in sky' instrument display systems that have been prototyped over the last few years.
As for people who are concerned about failure. Rest assured that even today, aircraft of all sizes that are certified for instrument flight have redundant gauges and systems. Even a B777 has a simple mechanical aritificial horizon and wet-compass hidden in with the electronic instruments.
I stumbled (ok Googled) across some interesting and moving photos from Pripyat, the town where the Chernobyl workers were housed.
Shocking and worth a read / look.
I think all the people proposing a rate limited iptables / packet filter solution are on the right track, but missing a bigger part of the problem
.
You want to be able to stop those packets from hitting your 384Kbps xDSL line. Otherwise, you are not only losing processing time dealing with the junk; you are having to give up a fraction of your bandwidth too.
Admittedly, it isn't a large chunk of your bandwidth. Likely around 3/4 - 1.0 %. However, it won't take much to get out of control.
This is where the real problem lies, and; xDSL service providers seldom are willing to route or modify the feeds they send clients. In fact, they frequently don't have the infrastructure for it at all.
That's too bad. However, one can argue that you have to work in an environment that really doesn't promote a switch. This isn't Apple's fault. As always, the right tool for the right job.
A.
My Pioneer car stereo had this in Apr 2000! So... I'm sure they've been capable at some scale for a while.
I worked for many years as a contractor at a large US-based defense company. They make lots of neat useful things, and some nasty things.
One thing was always stressed, in the hardware departments, in the software departments, in the finance departments, wherever. If you go into a lab, you must have ESD training. At least 3 levels of training existed. Level 1 was little more than awareness training. If something had an ESD warning label, stay clear of it. Don't touch. Etc. Why? The training also emphasized the costs associated with ESD damage to components. A great deal of effort was spent making sure that we all understood that ESD damage to components might not be visible or even detectable at test / QA time, HOWEVER, in the field, the defect rate over time was dramatically lower when ESD controls were in place on the assembly and test / QA lines. This was serious stuff, the examples ranged from deployed PCs going inop after years of reliable service up to air-to-air missiles not functioning due to static damage. In the end, a very large sum of money was spent investigating the effects of ESD on the reliability of components in the field and it was determined that the benefits far out paced the costs of training everyone and taking precautions in the labs.
I now work somewhere much smaller and have a really hard time getting people to believe that ESD is real. I even had to fight a bit to ESD mats at the workstations where we do assembly.
There are a lot of myths and misperceptions surrounding ESD incidents, and I think that people would be well served by understanding that damange to electronic devices is not either fatal or non-fatal. A FET device might have it's gate region severely weakened by an ESD incident, but it would appear to function normally for an extended period of time. Perhaps the thermal efficiency has been compromised because the gate has partially broken down. The added thermal stress on the part over time will lead to early failure. The reason, naively, would look like a bum part or a thermal problem. The ESD problems don't always reach out and slap you across the face with a sign that says: "Zapped by poor assembly / handling techniques".
Yeah, I know that, but I also know these things are virtually indestructible and are really easy to build. Anyone who can build a switching power supply wouldn't be asking how to change 12V to 5V on slashdot, and I wouldn't reccomend building a switching power supply as a "starter" electronics project.
:-) And if you do, stop buying such junk!
True enough. I guess I overlooked that part.
From my experience the parts don't actually completely stop supplying voltage. They just stop regulating, and if that means a 1 volt increase to your stuff (its a battery, so there's not going to be a lot of noise on the line), I doubt you need to worry about it.
True enough, thinking back (ok, way back) I think my first project was a power supply based around 78XX parts and a selector switch. That is a long way from a switching supply.
You really don't want to use an LM317 part. This is a linear regulator and a good chuck of your power budget will be spent heating this part up. Also, it will not supply 12V very nicely. Linear regs need a source voltage somewhat above the target output voltage. The drop-out voltage for this part is always above 1.0V and can even reach 2.5V in some cases. (See the PDF).
Perhaps this isn't the right way to go at all. The spam problem will effectively go away if people would adopt secure email. That is, if everyone would digitally sign their email and the certification authorities were somehow trusted enough to not hand out false credentials. Then, it becomes a simple case of ignoring all unsigned / unauthenticatated email. Businesses could still spam, but you'd know it was commercial in nature and better yet, who was responsible.
Imagine that? Accountability in email. How novel.
I think a proprietary scheme that relies on court enforcement is just going to be a losing proposition in the long run.
Not the media. The media streams (presently) are mostly UDP streams. This will change once the end-to-end encryption has been implemented by the proxy and UA manufacturers.
It's worth pointing out whether it is tasteful or not is one thing, but the fact is that legislation make is the obligation of the service provider to tap and provide access to a subscriber's calls when the appropriate procedures are followed by law enforcement officials.
The CALEA hurddle, as it is starting to be known in the VoIP world, has solutions, some of them good. Typically the place where you are interested in maintaining your internal network VoIP security or gating control is a good place to implement a CALEA solution too.
Many of the current VoIP deployments today are not using the security features that you might expect to see. In large, this is because the standard itself is maturing and the manner in which security will be implemented is still under investigation. In the case of SIP, the article points out that although the payload (voice) might be encrypted, the signalling isn't. This is not entirely true. One thing that SIP permits is to tunnel SIP as a payload within SIP. The external session serves only as a routing mechanism for the fully encrypted 'real' signaling session contained within. These mechanisms are just completing peer review and implementors are just wrapping their heads around it all. One thing is for sure; unlike protocols that have preceeded them, SIP and it's designers are taking security very seriously. How else could they consider using SIP as an integral part of 3GPP and/or it's use for inter-carrier peering.
Sure, the protocol itself may have exposure issues, and problems with NAT/PAT devices, but there are companies on the market that are addressing these issues as they arise.
Flat spins, such as the one depicted in "Top Gun", can indeed be a problem because the aircract lacks rudder authority in that situation, and rudder is important to stall recovery.
;-) )
Er perhaps you mean spin, or incipient spin.
In an aeroplane where the thrust component is inline with the CG and the aerodynamic centre of pressure, such that there is no rotational (yaw) moment generated by the powerplant, there would be no need for rudder when recovering from a co-ordinated stall.
A spin however, where you are wishing to neutralise the rotational component before recovering the stall, you'd need rudder authority. ( A spin is an asymetric stall where one wing is generating more lift than the other, causing a rotational moment about the yaw axis. -- not entirely correct, but more correct than not.
Er, which capital city are you thinking of?
There isn't even a city where the G8 is officially being held (Kananaskis) and Calgary is neither a federal nor a provincial capital.
Toronto, is not Canada's capital either.
Ottawa holds that dubious honour. Toronto just thinks it's the captial of Canada and, of course, many people around the world get fooled.
For good time, you can always check what our southern neighbours think about us.
Although I cannot find a specific-cool link at their site, the Human Performance Lab in the Department of Kinesthetics has been doing some mightly cool motion capture and analysis of atheletes, normal people and people with physical limitations for years. Very cool Sun based motion tracking system. My climbing partner in Uni used to be the technician for the capture / analysis systems. They were SPARC systems at the time, from sun.
As other posters have mentioned, motion capture and motion synthesis tend to be very different problems, although in an end product (if it is a rendering) may contain elements of both.
Alias' tools still tend to be some of the better products out there for synthesis. If you are serious about capture, I know that the U of C department would at least be a starting place for software sources. I know that it wasn't an inexpensive setup.
CISCO 2600s some with FXS/FXO, some with T1 cards.
Well, all the snom phones around our office (and they are very nice by the way) claim to be booting 2.4.3...
Other posters who suggest that you do some studying are not unwise. Digital logic is straightforward when you have a background in combinatorial logic and a few other concepts up to about 25MHz. Designs with that level of clock speed can easily be wire-wrapped. Beyond that, you are going to have to start considering high-speed design issues when you route your boards.
One of the most rewarding things that I did as an undergrad was design my own SBC around a Motorola 68HC11 to run the mechanics for a 3-D scanning system that interfaced to an SGI workstation.
I really think that if this interests you, you should pursue it . The current 'state of the hobby' is now so advanced that it is somewhat mind numbing what can be done with some FPGAs and some software to layout a PCB.
The Motorola Dragonball family (or it's decendants) are an excellent 68000 core family of chips that are easy to use and you can design a modestly useful machine around them with a classic buss / memory mapped IO architecture without working up too much of a sweat.
Good Luck!Vancouver International Airport (YVR) has had a Nokia system installed for some time now. It works very well and rates have varied from free (on trials) to 9.95$ CDN / day (ISTR). Hopefully this sort of thing will catch on because it is a very nice service to have while you wait for your flight. Especially these days, where you are potentially spending several hours at the airport prior to your flight.
This has been floating around on other tech lists for a while. There is a descent article on HP's site about the technology and their envisioned application here.
You might see if you can get a hold of a Dialogic Board.
See my previous posting about a system I implemented here .
The company that offered the dial-out product no longer produces interactive outgoing voice systems or I would include a link here.
A quick disclaimer. I am not a physisict, however, I am a pilot.
The problem isn't with the strength of the blades so much as it is with the rotor tip (linear) speed.
The forces on the blades varies with the square of the RPM, so, for an increase of 100x, you get an increase of 10000x in 'centrifugal' forces on the blades. [Ref: Aerodynamics For Naval Aviators, pg 113 and 148 ]. (or a Canadian Source)
Long before we design a rotor that is strong enough to do this, the tips of said rotor will exceed the speed of sound on Mars at whatever density altitude you are at. The onset of compressibility effects and eventually shock wave propagation will adversely affect the lift generated by the rotor.
More likely would be a LARGE, slow, rotor. This is where the nano-tube technologies might have an opportunity to shine.
You can read lots more about rotor-wing principles at this location.
Disclaimer: I am not a rotor-head. I fly a fixed wing.
It might just be me, but in my former experience being a SysAdmin for several junior oil companies, one thing really stood out in the IT and infrastructure areas: These people were extra conservative.
Whereas the exploration group was running on really nice (for the time) new SGI machines, the production group was being more reserved with Sparc/SUN solutions and the accounting department was positively in the dark ages with an old AS/400 mainframe. It was considered quite radical when they migrated to a bunch of AIX boxes and they were terrified to do it.
Don't misunderstand me, I'd love to see the adoption of linux and open-source solutions in this arena, but I feel that this is likely an area that will meet with substantial resistance.
I am using a very simliar setup. RH6.2 on a SONY Z505R (the modern one would be the HS or HE I think) with a Motorola L7089 tri-band phone. Works everywhere I've been (UK, Switzerland, Belgium, USA, Canada). No need for a modem either, just IR the phone to the laptop. Not the cheapest solution, but it does work well. Just make sure that you contact your local mobile provider and enable world-wide roaming. Some GSM providers have better roaming agreements than others. Shop around before you sign up if you are planning to roam in North America or Australia. I can't help much with that, since I am in Canada and use FIDO aka Microcell.