Yes I know those RC choppers are tough to fly. But that are RC aircraft, not drones. Drones are supposed to fly themselves, as in operator gives instructions like "go from A via B to C and then back to base". Drone does the rest.
The small planes carried by troops to look over the next hill, that's more like an RC plane than a drone. Those things are usually flown within eyesight of the operator, who manually steers the craft. And even then one needs serious practice to fly one.
Anyway it should not be too hard to make a "fly-by-wire" RC plane, in between the pure RC and the drone. With that I mean the operator gives basic instructions to the aircraft (go up, down, left, right, faster, slower) and the craft is smart enough to just follow those instructions, setting trim and engine speeds and whatnot in a manner that it won't fall out of the sky. That way it should be possible for an absolute beginner to fly a helicopter: you tell where it's going, the computer takes care of keeping the thing airborne and going where it's instructed to go. It's just the operator's responsibility to make sure it won't crash into something.
Now if only the second swipe animation would be done in four instead of thirty frames, it could be finished in 0.15 seconds and feel (and be) really a lot faster.
Sure a Mac costs money, but less than a week of developer salary. The cost isn't an issue.
Many if not most developers are hobby developers, who have a phone, and like to fiddle with it. They don't get a developer salary, they probably don't get paid at all, well a few dollars on ad revenue maybe if they care to put ads in their app. They may or may not have a Mac. Cost for them may very well be a real issue.
Well, this and this for example. Just the first two links of a Google search on "hometown of george bush". Hometown to me is where someone grew up, or lived most of their lives, not necessarily where they were born.
Your headline jumps the gun; as the article you link to also says: it is a possibility, but we can't say what really happened until the crash investigation has finished.
A small consumer-grade HD camera won't do either, at least not for anyone wanting to make good quality film. With proper exposure, colour balance, and contrast (no overexposed backgrounds on pitch black foregrounds - OK that's exaggerating of course but you get the idea).
Those UAVs the US army is using nowadays can carry weapons and bombs. Those bombs could be replaced by movie cameras - the carrying capacity is not an issue. The air resistance of a camera mounted to the plane could be, though nothing a stronger engine can not overcome; the lower operational range will still be good enough for a movie shoot.
The main drawback of plane over helicopter type UAV is that a plane must maintain a minimum speed. And for many shots, like filming a walking/running person from above, that minimum speed is far too high, and one would need a helicopter for that.
And then again I don't see why we can't build unmanned helicopters like we can build unmanned planes. It's not that they are that different. Navigation is the same; flight control is different of course but I don't see why a computer wouldn't be able to handle that as it's pretty straight-forward.
I'm not talking about the specific software package being status quo; I mean the level of the technology.
Web technology has not advanced for a decade since the demise of Netscape (no viable competition for IE), only with the rise of Firefox and the added competition from Chrome and Safari there was movement in that arena. MS effectively blocked the rise of web-based applications for a long time.
Office is one of their biggest cash cows, and again depends on being used on the desktop. For the average user (and probably some 90% of the use) the 2005-2007 level is more than enough. Nothing really new has come since that's of use for the average user.
Office depends on Windows, so as long as businesses depend on Office, they depend on Windows. Another reason to block web development, and to halt competition in the arena (i.e. OpenOffice/LibreOffice et.al. and the use of odf document format). MS managed to keep the world on their proprietary formats and with it stuck to an office suit on a desktop computer. Editing a Word document on a tablet is still not well supported (and then I don't mean the lack of a keyboard, simply the reading, editing and saving of such formats).
The vote was near anonymous. More than 90% against. That's not just populism, the pirate parties don't make any serious inroads.
Greece is a bad example: that country is in shatters, and people will vote for whoever is not part of the old leadership. The austerity there hurts too, of course, many people don't like it of course, but it seems the overall opinion of the Greek people is that their country should stay in the Eurozone. That's at least what they're currently heading for.
The description of the puzzle by The Telegraph already says you have to resort to trial-and-error (unless you can think ahead ten moves in your head):
Instead of being able to spot where a number goes based solely on the boxes that have already been filled in, most moves will face you with two or more spaces where a number could fit.
Only one of these is correct, but to find it you must examine all possible options for your next move and perhaps the move after that, continuing in the same vein until all but one potential route results in a dead end.
If it were the US government I'd be very sceptic indeed; the EU parliament is a lot better when it comes to privacy. I'm sure it's not that hard to design these things in a way that does not allow them to be used for surveillance or tracking.
Quite some cities (Amsterdam, Enschede and Den Haag in The Netherlands come to mind) do just that already. They build a large car park at the edge of the city, at the exit of the motorway, and run cheap and frequent shuttle buses or trams to the city centre.
If you really want you're still allowed to enter the city by car, but if you want to park it in the centre you have to deal with higher parking fees if you can find a place to park; traffic jams; and trying to find your way (most cities' street plans resemble a maze). Most of these transferiums as they're called are quite successful.
Use the emergency call service of any available mobile network.
Already when your phone is without SIM, or when you don't have your home network or a roaming network available, it will use any other available network to allow for emergency calls. This one as it's automatic will likely use SMS service, maybe data.
All this system needs to have is a GPS receiver and a SIM-less mobile phone, both are cheap. Add an impact detection (link to the air bags?) and have the whole thing ruggedised, and you're set.
Over the past several decades they have always been highly defensive. Every offensive move (aggressive pricing of Office to outcompete WordPerfect; developing a web browser to kill off Netscape; hostile take-over of other competing companies) have always been to defend the status quo which includes Windows on the desktop. MS never innovated much, instead they have bought up many small companies with innovative products, sometimes including the product in their own offering, usually killing it off (by making it suck).
MS makes money by selling Windows and Office to the desktop computers. Anything that threatens this status quo they will defend against.
Now the mobile computing has quite suddenly matured and become popular, and that's what keeps MS scrambling. They don't have an easy answer to that. It's too big to buy (and Apple and Google are not for sale, anyway), and most devices are using hardware that Windows doesn't work well on (ARM processors, touch screens, small screens, no keyboard/mouse).
Add to that the notorious slowness of MS and the company has a big problem. The first iPhone, that set off the revolution, was released five years ago. The first Android release by Google followed two years later. Another three years later and MS still doesn't have a viable competitor, and is by many considered a few years behind Android and iOS.
MS is on the defensive, still, while to survive they must be on the offensive. The Surface proves that they are trying to do just that now. An interesting concept, I wonder if it will be released as product before competitors take over the ideas and release their own. When the first iPad was announced by Apple it was mere weeks before the Chinese manufacturers started to churn out 7" iPads - running Android but looking exactly like the real thing. Just smaller, and cheaper.
The first generation GSM phones also lasted barely a day (and being a phone, for them battery life was even more critical than for tablets/laptops).
Later generations lasted for weeks - and subsequently battery life disappeared from advertising. Now current-generation smartphones take a serious step back on those battery lives, it's still generally good enough to not be an issue.
Tablets and laptops now have the battery life issue, but there are plenty of devices already on the market that advertise to last 8-12 hour on battery power alone. Even if in practice it's 6-8 hours, it means we're getting close to full day battery life (12-16 hours is enough for most purposes).
The display is the biggest obstacle; we need a fast-refreshing reflective colour screen, doing away with the backlight saves heaps of power.
The "bug" in this case was Facebook's decision to modify their users' contact info without permission. The API is not to blame here.
You're close.
Facebook simply thought with the fantastic services they offer everyone would be delighted that they would be able to use facebook for their e-mail needs as well. The bug was that they didn't realise that there are a few, probably just a highly vocal minority of their users, that doesn't consider Facebook the be-all and end-all for their communications.
And personally, I'm still hoping for a viable competitor to rise.
Possibly you are more correct than you think you are. It sounds like they had the license for TV broadcasts, and for video tape. But not for DVD or any other formats.
But the quetion remains why they had to change the music for TV re-runs - I would indeed expect they have a license to use the music for unlimited re-runs. Unless after changing the music for the DVD release, they only made available for TV broadcast the new version. The TV stations usually buy series on a per-run basis, afaik.
Living now in a country where hurricanes (we call them typhoons) are a yearly occurrence, I know that they are no excuse for power outages. Normally typhoons take down some advertising signs, a handful of trees, that's about it. Tornadoes that's indeed something quite unique US, probably because no-where else in the world there are large enough areas of virtually flat land.
Taiwan some years ago had outages, and villages cut off, but that was due to huge landslides. A typhoon dropped about two meters of rain in a single day on the island, that was really extreme. But even then power outages were limited to remote villages in the mountains.
Power lines are not in pipes, and if they are, they can stand being submerged. The power lines that I've seen being buried (or dug up for maintenance) usually just have thick layers of insulation and no extra pipe (i.e. air) around them. They go straight in the ground, straight into contact wiht the moist soil. And I wouldn't be surprised if quite some of those lines are below ground water level.
It's quite worrying that your phone/DSL provider didn't either make sure the pipes are absolutely sealed off and can't flood, or that the equipment is waterproof. After all you're working underground, so water IS an issue.
Come to think of it: on an almost montly basis I hear news items about millions of people out of power due to fairly common severe weather. Hurricanes, blizzards, tornadoes - that kind of weather. On one hand a natural disaster, on the other hand a rather frequently occuring one, and something that people can (and should) prepare for.
Virtually all of these news items occur in the US. Power outages in Europe are rare - those lasting longer than a few hours almost unheard of. The almost 30 years that I lived in Netherlands I experienced two or three serious outages, none lasting longer than a couple of hours before power was back on. The last decade in Hong Kong not a single power outage that effected me; the only serious one that I know of was limited to a nearby residential block that within two hours had an emergency power generator stationed there to provide basic power to use the lifts and so.
Other parts of Asia, which includes many developing countries, don't seem to have those problems. China has problems with power, but that are brown-outs due to power shortage. Power outages due to natural disasters are really rare there, too.
I think you're totally right when you talk about dilipadated infrastructure. For some reason the US doesn't manage to get a proper power grid going. Many cables are still above ground, even where digging is easy (e.g. Switzerland has lots of above-ground cables because digging in rock is so damn hard), so if a tree falls, it takes down cables with it, and probably one or two poles too. Lightning strikes will be common (and if that doesn't break the power supply, the surge may destroy equipment in homes).
Another common thing here on/. is talk about having a UPS for your PC. I don't, never had, don't see the need for it. Power is reliably enough. No need for emergency backup, no need for surge protection (other than a surge protected power strip). I have yet to see my PC spontanously turn off due to a sudden power cut. Yet apparently that's on the order of the day in the US.
It takes longer for PDAs and phones A-GPS because of the abysmal performance of their GPS receivers.
You say that in a pretty negative tone. I know the first iPhone created such an image (and its GPS was poor), but it's far from true these days.
My cheap-end smartphone, with A-GPS, often has a fix within seconds. Without A-GPS it surely takes longer. Accuracy overall is good. Phone GPS performance is very similar to that of dedicated GPS devices of about three years ago.
Signal strength is unreliable, as it depends on the atmosphere in between you and the transmitter. Yet you may be able to get time data (summary mentions digital signals only) and based on that calculate your distance.
In urban, in my experience, GPS signals can generally be received but are unreliable due to reflections: the GPSr assumes direct line to the satellite, not via a reflection. As a result GPS in urban areas is often off-set, or jumpy (location jumps by 20-30m in any direction)
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Yes I know those RC choppers are tough to fly. But that are RC aircraft, not drones. Drones are supposed to fly themselves, as in operator gives instructions like "go from A via B to C and then back to base". Drone does the rest.
The small planes carried by troops to look over the next hill, that's more like an RC plane than a drone. Those things are usually flown within eyesight of the operator, who manually steers the craft. And even then one needs serious practice to fly one.
Anyway it should not be too hard to make a "fly-by-wire" RC plane, in between the pure RC and the drone. With that I mean the operator gives basic instructions to the aircraft (go up, down, left, right, faster, slower) and the craft is smart enough to just follow those instructions, setting trim and engine speeds and whatnot in a manner that it won't fall out of the sky. That way it should be possible for an absolute beginner to fly a helicopter: you tell where it's going, the computer takes care of keeping the thing airborne and going where it's instructed to go. It's just the operator's responsibility to make sure it won't crash into something.
Now if only the second swipe animation would be done in four instead of thirty frames, it could be finished in 0.15 seconds and feel (and be) really a lot faster.
Sure a Mac costs money, but less than a week of developer salary. The cost isn't an issue.
Many if not most developers are hobby developers, who have a phone, and like to fiddle with it. They don't get a developer salary, they probably don't get paid at all, well a few dollars on ad revenue maybe if they care to put ads in their app. They may or may not have a Mac. Cost for them may very well be a real issue.
Well, this and this for example. Just the first two links of a Google search on "hometown of george bush". Hometown to me is where someone grew up, or lived most of their lives, not necessarily where they were born.
Didn't the two presidents Bush come from Texas?
Look at texas politicians... are they known for being great orators? It's a problem.
It does prove your point of course :-)
I stand corrected :-)
Your headline jumps the gun; as the article you link to also says: it is a possibility, but we can't say what really happened until the crash investigation has finished.
A small consumer-grade HD camera won't do either, at least not for anyone wanting to make good quality film. With proper exposure, colour balance, and contrast (no overexposed backgrounds on pitch black foregrounds - OK that's exaggerating of course but you get the idea).
Those UAVs the US army is using nowadays can carry weapons and bombs. Those bombs could be replaced by movie cameras - the carrying capacity is not an issue. The air resistance of a camera mounted to the plane could be, though nothing a stronger engine can not overcome; the lower operational range will still be good enough for a movie shoot.
The main drawback of plane over helicopter type UAV is that a plane must maintain a minimum speed. And for many shots, like filming a walking/running person from above, that minimum speed is far too high, and one would need a helicopter for that.
And then again I don't see why we can't build unmanned helicopters like we can build unmanned planes. It's not that they are that different. Navigation is the same; flight control is different of course but I don't see why a computer wouldn't be able to handle that as it's pretty straight-forward.
I'm not talking about the specific software package being status quo; I mean the level of the technology.
Web technology has not advanced for a decade since the demise of Netscape (no viable competition for IE), only with the rise of Firefox and the added competition from Chrome and Safari there was movement in that arena. MS effectively blocked the rise of web-based applications for a long time.
Office is one of their biggest cash cows, and again depends on being used on the desktop. For the average user (and probably some 90% of the use) the 2005-2007 level is more than enough. Nothing really new has come since that's of use for the average user.
Office depends on Windows, so as long as businesses depend on Office, they depend on Windows. Another reason to block web development, and to halt competition in the arena (i.e. OpenOffice/LibreOffice et.al. and the use of odf document format). MS managed to keep the world on their proprietary formats and with it stuck to an office suit on a desktop computer. Editing a Word document on a tablet is still not well supported (and then I don't mean the lack of a keyboard, simply the reading, editing and saving of such formats).
The vote was near anonymous. More than 90% against. That's not just populism, the pirate parties don't make any serious inroads.
Greece is a bad example: that country is in shatters, and people will vote for whoever is not part of the old leadership. The austerity there hurts too, of course, many people don't like it of course, but it seems the overall opinion of the Greek people is that their country should stay in the Eurozone. That's at least what they're currently heading for.
The description of the puzzle by The Telegraph already says you have to resort to trial-and-error (unless you can think ahead ten moves in your head):
Instead of being able to spot where a number goes based solely on the boxes that have already been filled in, most moves will face you with two or more spaces where a number could fit.
Only one of these is correct, but to find it you must examine all possible options for your next move and perhaps the move after that, continuing in the same vein until all but one potential route results in a dead end.
If it were the US government I'd be very sceptic indeed; the EU parliament is a lot better when it comes to privacy. I'm sure it's not that hard to design these things in a way that does not allow them to be used for surveillance or tracking.
Quite some cities (Amsterdam, Enschede and Den Haag in The Netherlands come to mind) do just that already. They build a large car park at the edge of the city, at the exit of the motorway, and run cheap and frequent shuttle buses or trams to the city centre.
If you really want you're still allowed to enter the city by car, but if you want to park it in the centre you have to deal with higher parking fees if you can find a place to park; traffic jams; and trying to find your way (most cities' street plans resemble a maze). Most of these transferiums as they're called are quite successful.
Use the emergency call service of any available mobile network.
Already when your phone is without SIM, or when you don't have your home network or a roaming network available, it will use any other available network to allow for emergency calls. This one as it's automatic will likely use SMS service, maybe data.
All this system needs to have is a GPS receiver and a SIM-less mobile phone, both are cheap. Add an impact detection (link to the air bags?) and have the whole thing ruggedised, and you're set.
Since when has MS been on the offensive?
Over the past several decades they have always been highly defensive. Every offensive move (aggressive pricing of Office to outcompete WordPerfect; developing a web browser to kill off Netscape; hostile take-over of other competing companies) have always been to defend the status quo which includes Windows on the desktop. MS never innovated much, instead they have bought up many small companies with innovative products, sometimes including the product in their own offering, usually killing it off (by making it suck).
MS makes money by selling Windows and Office to the desktop computers. Anything that threatens this status quo they will defend against.
Now the mobile computing has quite suddenly matured and become popular, and that's what keeps MS scrambling. They don't have an easy answer to that. It's too big to buy (and Apple and Google are not for sale, anyway), and most devices are using hardware that Windows doesn't work well on (ARM processors, touch screens, small screens, no keyboard/mouse).
Add to that the notorious slowness of MS and the company has a big problem. The first iPhone, that set off the revolution, was released five years ago. The first Android release by Google followed two years later. Another three years later and MS still doesn't have a viable competitor, and is by many considered a few years behind Android and iOS.
MS is on the defensive, still, while to survive they must be on the offensive. The Surface proves that they are trying to do just that now. An interesting concept, I wonder if it will be released as product before competitors take over the ideas and release their own. When the first iPad was announced by Apple it was mere weeks before the Chinese manufacturers started to churn out 7" iPads - running Android but looking exactly like the real thing. Just smaller, and cheaper.
The first generation GSM phones also lasted barely a day (and being a phone, for them battery life was even more critical than for tablets/laptops).
Later generations lasted for weeks - and subsequently battery life disappeared from advertising. Now current-generation smartphones take a serious step back on those battery lives, it's still generally good enough to not be an issue.
Tablets and laptops now have the battery life issue, but there are plenty of devices already on the market that advertise to last 8-12 hour on battery power alone. Even if in practice it's 6-8 hours, it means we're getting close to full day battery life (12-16 hours is enough for most purposes).
The display is the biggest obstacle; we need a fast-refreshing reflective colour screen, doing away with the backlight saves heaps of power.
The "bug" in this case was Facebook's decision to modify their users' contact info without permission. The API is not to blame here.
You're close.
Facebook simply thought with the fantastic services they offer everyone would be delighted that they would be able to use facebook for their e-mail needs as well. The bug was that they didn't realise that there are a few, probably just a highly vocal minority of their users, that doesn't consider Facebook the be-all and end-all for their communications.
And personally, I'm still hoping for a viable competitor to rise.
The war on piracy hurts Google because Google is considered one of the pirates.
They're now just trying to show they're on the anti-pirates' side.
Possibly you are more correct than you think you are. It sounds like they had the license for TV broadcasts, and for video tape. But not for DVD or any other formats.
But the quetion remains why they had to change the music for TV re-runs - I would indeed expect they have a license to use the music for unlimited re-runs. Unless after changing the music for the DVD release, they only made available for TV broadcast the new version. The TV stations usually buy series on a per-run basis, afaik.
Living now in a country where hurricanes (we call them typhoons) are a yearly occurrence, I know that they are no excuse for power outages. Normally typhoons take down some advertising signs, a handful of trees, that's about it. Tornadoes that's indeed something quite unique US, probably because no-where else in the world there are large enough areas of virtually flat land.
Taiwan some years ago had outages, and villages cut off, but that was due to huge landslides. A typhoon dropped about two meters of rain in a single day on the island, that was really extreme. But even then power outages were limited to remote villages in the mountains.
Above-ground is cheaper in building and maintenance. Even with the lots and lots of extra maintenance needed.
Power lines are not in pipes, and if they are, they can stand being submerged. The power lines that I've seen being buried (or dug up for maintenance) usually just have thick layers of insulation and no extra pipe (i.e. air) around them. They go straight in the ground, straight into contact wiht the moist soil. And I wouldn't be surprised if quite some of those lines are below ground water level.
It's quite worrying that your phone/DSL provider didn't either make sure the pipes are absolutely sealed off and can't flood, or that the equipment is waterproof. After all you're working underground, so water IS an issue.
Not just in Europe.
Come to think of it: on an almost montly basis I hear news items about millions of people out of power due to fairly common severe weather. Hurricanes, blizzards, tornadoes - that kind of weather. On one hand a natural disaster, on the other hand a rather frequently occuring one, and something that people can (and should) prepare for.
Virtually all of these news items occur in the US. Power outages in Europe are rare - those lasting longer than a few hours almost unheard of. The almost 30 years that I lived in Netherlands I experienced two or three serious outages, none lasting longer than a couple of hours before power was back on. The last decade in Hong Kong not a single power outage that effected me; the only serious one that I know of was limited to a nearby residential block that within two hours had an emergency power generator stationed there to provide basic power to use the lifts and so.
Other parts of Asia, which includes many developing countries, don't seem to have those problems. China has problems with power, but that are brown-outs due to power shortage. Power outages due to natural disasters are really rare there, too.
I think you're totally right when you talk about dilipadated infrastructure. For some reason the US doesn't manage to get a proper power grid going. Many cables are still above ground, even where digging is easy (e.g. Switzerland has lots of above-ground cables because digging in rock is so damn hard), so if a tree falls, it takes down cables with it, and probably one or two poles too. Lightning strikes will be common (and if that doesn't break the power supply, the surge may destroy equipment in homes).
Another common thing here on /. is talk about having a UPS for your PC. I don't, never had, don't see the need for it. Power is reliably enough. No need for emergency backup, no need for surge protection (other than a surge protected power strip). I have yet to see my PC spontanously turn off due to a sudden power cut. Yet apparently that's on the order of the day in the US.
It takes longer for PDAs and phones A-GPS because of the abysmal performance of their GPS receivers.
You say that in a pretty negative tone. I know the first iPhone created such an image (and its GPS was poor), but it's far from true these days.
My cheap-end smartphone, with A-GPS, often has a fix within seconds. Without A-GPS it surely takes longer. Accuracy overall is good. Phone GPS performance is very similar to that of dedicated GPS devices of about three years ago.
Signal strength is unreliable, as it depends on the atmosphere in between you and the transmitter. Yet you may be able to get time data (summary mentions digital signals only) and based on that calculate your distance.
In urban, in my experience, GPS signals can generally be received but are unreliable due to reflections: the GPSr assumes direct line to the satellite, not via a reflection. As a result GPS in urban areas is often off-set, or jumpy (location jumps by 20-30m in any direction)