Damn, you got me stuck in an endless loop with that recursive footnote there, until my cube neighbor rebooted me. Careful with those asterisks, cowboy.
> as long as a human being can see or hear it that it can be recoded
That's why they will be lobbying hard for mandatory DRM-compliant cochlear implants for the entire consumer population. If it ain't legal, you ain't hearin' it.
> The A300 is an old design which [...] does not have fly-by-wire controls
It actually was an A300-600, which according to some information does have FBW. Event Airbus' website it inconclusive about these details. Regardless, supposedly even in the A320 and later the rudder has mechanical linkages (as a backup, not all controls are FBW), so my suggestion that FBW could lead to excessive rudder use couldn't have been the issue.
> In comparison, the fly-by-wire controls on the B777 have > "soft" limits - the pilot can exceed them by pulling harder
It's not a matter of pulling too hard, though--the problem wasn't that the pilot deflected the rudder too much, but rather that he fully deflected too often. Imposing software limits on this type of thing is trickier; what do you do, refuse full deflection after X times? That might be doable given enough thought, but you'd want to make sure that some level of control is still allowed. Alternatively you could introduce some kind of "recharging" paradigm, where the pilot could perform one or two full lock-to-lock deflections, after which the system would issue a warning and only allow 50% deflections for the next few seconds or whatever (kind of like waiting for a gun to recharge in a shooter game). I don't know whether this five full deflections limit is within a given time interval (say, within a few seconds), or within a service interval (i.e. before the next plane maintenance). If you're just not allowed to exceed a certain rate of full deflections, my suggestion might work. If OTOH the whole structure is weakened after five deflections and needs servicing (bolt retightening etc.), that of course wouldn't help.
> the "composite" materials some blamed for the failure > of the rudder were not used on the A300
I believe the A300-600 that crashed did have composite components. From what I remember, that was one of the reasons the whole model family was grounded, to examine if lacking understanding of composite fatigue was to blame.
Actually no, that's not at all an analogy for what happened. The steering system of the car would most likely not fail, you would just flip the car. I talked to an experienced jet pilot and he said that aircraft have published specs for how many successive lock-to-lock rudder deflections are allowed. No passenger jet could withstand more than a few such successive deflections, regardless of manufacturer. The thing about Airbus planes is that they have fly-by-wire rudder control and for a pilot inexperienced on such a system it requires no great physical effort to flap the rudder back and forth repeatedly. Conventional cable controls tend to require quite a bit more force, and that alone makes it less likely for a pilot to do that sort of thing.
Think about how forces are transmitted as the rudder is deflected: the air hits the deflected rudder, which transmits a force through the rudder attachment points into the vertical tail surface, making the tail want to move in the opposite direction to the rudder deflection. The whole tail and rudder structure basically behaves like one fan or propeller blade, with the tail end of the airframe acting as the hub. The whole airframe section there would experience a twisting force during rudder deflection. Now deflect the rudder in the opposite direction, and the tail will twist the airframe into the other direction. Repeat this processs again and again, and eventually this will weaken the tail attachment points to the airframe. Eventually something will fail. And if you think that only Airbus planes have this problem, maybe Boeing is building their tails out of the same material as the black boxes. Just ask them.
> A fleet of planes that costs 25% less to run could > result in a huge increase in profits.
Precisely. And that's why I would consider the 25% nothing more than marketing fluff. Just wait for that figure to shrink more and more as the plane nears release (if it ever does), and to end up being something like 5-6%. Still not bad, but that doesn't grab you like 25% at the vaporware stage. Also, as someone else pointed out, what exactly prevents Airbus from using the exact same engines and achieve the same savings?
> There are microprocessor drivin washer/dryers. However they are > at this time nearly 3-5 times the cost of a older style one.
Well, as an artifact of the US market. Doesn't mean in Europe they're also "3-5 times the cost". Check out this (store brand at a popular mail order company in Germany) for an example of a microprocessor-controlled combination washer/dryer (something you'd be hard-pressed to even find in the US). Around $800, or about the same you'd pay at Sears for less functionality and twice the size.
> In the states 'high tech' by some is defined by what you > can find at Best Buy or Circuit City
That's not what is meant by "high-tech" society. Any old country can import consumer goods and sell them in some store. What's typically meant is high-tech infrastructure and public facilities.
The rest of your rant about the benefits of cheap US gas and wide open spaces--well, Europe can't really help having less real estate. Kudos to the US for the wide open spaces and the NEED for cheap gas to roam around in them, I guess.
> How is your fancy stove with a microprocessor better
This is Slashdot, not a bohemian lifestyle forum, so that's a bit of an irrelevant question. Besides, why replace an old oven/stove that works perfectly? Because ovens and stoves crud up beyond anyone's ability to clean them nicely after 10-20 years of use. Because most people don't take their stove with them when moving to a new house. Because there comes a time in every (wo)man's life when (s)he is placed in the situation of requiring a new stove. Because of entropy.
If I were that far off with my comment IKEA wouldn't be laughing all the way to the bank with their sales of imported kitchens. And imported appliances to go with them would be an unknown thing.
Re:3G is a pathetic disappointment...
on
Is 3G Irrelevant?
·
· Score: 1
> Why use a picture message when a text message is so much clearer
Because a picture says a thousand words?! Just kidding. I think the industry has shown a phenomenal lack of foresight with UMTS. The writing has been on the wall for over a decade that the trend is towards integrated services--everything over one pipe, hail TCP/IP and open standards. The slate was clean, they could have gone for the grand slam of moving to IP phones and leaving proprietary protocols behind. With time and extra spectrum it could have grown into one seamless wireless cloud of phone, video, data, radio and TV connectivity. No more proprietary technologies for all the various things going over the air. Instead, we got UMTS. Oh well.
Re:tech, who has it??
on
Is 3G Irrelevant?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
> home appliances in the US are vastly superior
That's funny, I (and most people I know that have experienced both) think the opposite. American stoves and ovens are extremely crude, with controls and looks straight out of the 50s. Washing machines are even worse--practically everything you buy here in the states is driven by a mechanical program wheel, hardly any microprocessor driven washing machines at all. And they all use water like there's no tomorrow. Of course, water being much cheaper than in Europe, that doesn't matter as much. Fridges OTOH are nice and big in the US--not technologically more advanced, but bigger. Of course, since you HAVE to shop for a week at a time (given that the supermarket is half a fuel tank away), that makes sense. Even so, when living in Europe I could have always done with a larger fridge.
Overall, on average I'd say that living in Europe you tend to come into more contact with high-tech stuff than in the US: smart-card driven public phones, fancy ticket vending machines, automated public transportation, cell-phone-driven vending machines, etc. While you find some of this stuff in the US, it tends to be less prevalent. Of course, Japan has us way beaten on all of that stuff, but hey!
> so infrastructure changes there can and will proceed significantly faster
Not at all. Places like Japan or most European countries have virtually 100% coverage of the entire country, meaning that there is a sh*tload of infrastructure--just in a much tighter space. In fact, it would be interesting to see a comparison of the total number of cell towers deployed in the entire US versus some of these European countries or Japan. I doubt you'd see an order of magnitude difference.
A company is developing a plasma taser that sends an electric shock through a charged aerosol cloud that it sprays towards the victim. See Yahoo for English article, or Spiegel for German article with picture. All under the heading of non-leathal weapons.
> the ultra high-end SonyEricsson T68i at 450$ CDN
Well, not THAT ultra high-end, there are several models with more functionality that are more expensive. Plus, lately it's being discounted because SE is bringing out a successor with (what else?) a camera. You can find it on Amazon for $99 with a $100 rebate from T-Mobile. I'm tempted at the moment to get it, except for point two below.
> How about the cost of a Bluetooth PDA?
Exactly. To me, the PDA plus a few key devices (phone, storage, access point or PC integration) could be the Bluetooth killer app, if only anyone seriously pushed into the market as other than just a high-end checklist item. For example, I can get a BT Memory Stick card for my (cheap) Clie--but only from Europe or Asia for over $100, because Sony never targeted the US market for some reason. I'm certainly not going to spend more on the BT card than on my PDA and phone combined, and yet it would be an incredibly useful combination.
Of course, that also brings me to this ridiculous obsession with smaller and smaller memory media formats, which merely make it more difficult and expensive to integrate into the form factor the sorts of things people REALLY want to add on: communications and cameras, it seems. But that's another story...
True enough, I was just alluding to Disney's blatant (and royalty-free) plagiarazing of the Grimm brothers. Whose stories, of course, were not of exclusively German origins.
Incidentally, the disaster would most likely have occured even if helium had been used, since the fire started with the highly flammable aluminum powder-coated skin. Maybe fewer people would have died or burned, since the fire wouldn't have spread quite so quickly into the interior, but it would probably have gone down anyway.
> this is the engine technology that could very well power future cars
Don't think so. The trend is firmly in the direction of fuel cells and electric drive. The world is moving more and more into a solid state direction--more computers, less moving parts--because less mechanical complexity means more reliability and lower price (well, theoretically anyway). The overall achievable system efficiency of fuel cells and high efficiency electric motors is also considerably higher than what you can get with ICEs.
This is not to say that BMW is necessarily wasting their time with hydrogen burning engines. A considerable portion of the effort is devoted to hydrogen infrastructure and storage R&D, and that will be required long term regardless of which engine technology wins. Hydrocarbon fuel cells are only a medium-term stopgap measure anyway, it's not what you will want to be using in one hundred years. Pure hydrogen seems like the most likely long term energy carrier.
At least in the US cell carriers love being in total control of "their" hardware. So even if you have a very powerful hardware platform capable of doing MP3/GPS/browsing, the networks might limit what you can do with it within some artifical pricing model that extracts money from you for any useful bit of computing you perform with it. I'm thinking of some of the current Java phones that have no local means of synchronization and require you to go through the carrier for uploading any apps into the phone--for a price.
And I think the PDA makers have neglected this potentially huge market for way too long. Only now we're starting to get a trickle of PDAs with integrated wireless (Bluetooth or 802.11), whereas that could have been THE killer app for handhelds from day one. They concentrated for too long on WAN-type wireless, which until recently didn't have the infrastructure to do right (with GPRS it's finally getting there), while base-station-type home networking could have been done for a long time and would have been enough for a lot of people. As others have said, who wants to get up from in front of the TV and walk to the PC (probably in another room) to look up something, or carry a hot and heavy notebook on their lap, when you could just whip out the PDA and do the same thing? Let's face it, other than for commuting times most people spend most of their day within potential range of a base station, at home or at work.
On that note, I've also been getting frustrated with this obsession for smaller and smaller memory card formats. While these slots were always primarily intended for add-on memory, the reality is that an almost even more important use is for communications expansion, since most PDAs nowadays have adequate memory but inadequate connectivity. And it's simply a lot harder to pack especially new multi-chip technology into a SD or MS form factor than into a relatively roomier CF card. After all, the size of the card is hardly the limiting factor for the size of the PDA. Then again, with the trend of putting everything into new PDAs, after you've got a camera, BT, WiFi, GPRS modem and GPS receiver in there, maybe there's not much expanding left to do. Ah well...
Check at the bottom, under "The Cost". While Kuwait and Saudi Arabia paid the lion's share, I just listed France and Germany (plus Japan) because they're the ones being daemonized by the US, even though they contributed more financially to the first Gulf War than the US.
> The reconstruction [...] is being paid for primarily out of the pockets of the US taxpayers.
Really? Let's wait and see until it's all said and done, and--like the first time around--it will probably be most everyone else EXCEPT the US bearing the costs. See, that way they get the best of both worlds: they get the PR and get to pooh-pooh France and Germany, and then France and Germany (and Japan) will be the ones paying anyway, except without getting the credit. And France and Germany will be "happy" again that the "tensions" with Washington will be over. Who said international politics wasn't fun?
Slashdot Mirror
> Thank you, mistress of the obvious.
Then again, (s)he's only a member of Mensa.
Damn, you got me stuck in an endless loop with that recursive footnote there, until my cube neighbor rebooted me. Careful with those asterisks, cowboy.
> as long as a human being can see or hear it that it can be recoded
That's why they will be lobbying hard for mandatory DRM-compliant cochlear implants for the entire consumer population. If it ain't legal, you ain't hearin' it.
> It take too long to get new engines type certified on an existing aircraft
As opposed to building a whole new plane from scratch??? Get real!
> The A300 is an old design which [...] does not have fly-by-wire controls
It actually was an A300-600, which according to some information does have FBW. Event Airbus' website it inconclusive about these details. Regardless, supposedly even in the A320 and later the rudder has mechanical linkages (as a backup, not all controls are FBW), so my suggestion that FBW could lead to excessive rudder use couldn't have been the issue.
> In comparison, the fly-by-wire controls on the B777 have
> "soft" limits - the pilot can exceed them by pulling harder
It's not a matter of pulling too hard, though--the problem wasn't that the pilot deflected the rudder too much, but rather that he fully deflected too often. Imposing software limits on this type of thing is trickier; what do you do, refuse full deflection after X times? That might be doable given enough thought, but you'd want to make sure that some level of control is still allowed. Alternatively you could introduce some kind of "recharging" paradigm, where the pilot could perform one or two full lock-to-lock deflections, after which the system would issue a warning and only allow 50% deflections for the next few seconds or whatever (kind of like waiting for a gun to recharge in a shooter game). I don't know whether this five full deflections limit is within a given time interval (say, within a few seconds), or within a service interval (i.e. before the next plane maintenance). If you're just not allowed to exceed a certain rate of full deflections, my suggestion might work. If OTOH the whole structure is weakened after five deflections and needs servicing (bolt retightening etc.), that of course wouldn't help.
> the "composite" materials some blamed for the failure
> of the rudder were not used on the A300
I believe the A300-600 that crashed did have composite components. From what I remember, that was one of the reasons the whole model family was grounded, to examine if lacking understanding of composite fatigue was to blame.
Actually no, that's not at all an analogy for what happened. The steering system of the car would most likely not fail, you would just flip the car. I talked to an experienced jet pilot and he said that aircraft have published specs for how many successive lock-to-lock rudder deflections are allowed. No passenger jet could withstand more than a few such successive deflections, regardless of manufacturer. The thing about Airbus planes is that they have fly-by-wire rudder control and for a pilot inexperienced on such a system it requires no great physical effort to flap the rudder back and forth repeatedly. Conventional cable controls tend to require quite a bit more force, and that alone makes it less likely for a pilot to do that sort of thing.
Think about how forces are transmitted as the rudder is deflected: the air hits the deflected rudder, which transmits a force through the rudder attachment points into the vertical tail surface, making the tail want to move in the opposite direction to the rudder deflection. The whole tail and rudder structure basically behaves like one fan or propeller blade, with the tail end of the airframe acting as the hub. The whole airframe section there would experience a twisting force during rudder deflection. Now deflect the rudder in the opposite direction, and the tail will twist the airframe into the other direction. Repeat this processs again and again, and eventually this will weaken the tail attachment points to the airframe. Eventually something will fail. And if you think that only Airbus planes have this problem, maybe Boeing is building their tails out of the same material as the black boxes. Just ask them.
> A fleet of planes that costs 25% less to run could
> result in a huge increase in profits.
Precisely. And that's why I would consider the 25% nothing more than marketing fluff. Just wait for that figure to shrink more and more as the plane nears release (if it ever does), and to end up being something like 5-6%. Still not bad, but that doesn't grab you like 25% at the vaporware stage. Also, as someone else pointed out, what exactly prevents Airbus from using the exact same engines and achieve the same savings?
> You can buy the gamut of goods here.
Of course--if you accept imports.
> There are microprocessor drivin washer/dryers. However they are
> at this time nearly 3-5 times the cost of a older style one.
Well, as an artifact of the US market. Doesn't mean in Europe they're also "3-5 times the cost". Check out this (store brand at a popular mail order company in Germany) for an example of a microprocessor-controlled combination washer/dryer (something you'd be hard-pressed to even find in the US). Around $800, or about the same you'd pay at Sears for less functionality and twice the size.
> In the states 'high tech' by some is defined by what you
> can find at Best Buy or Circuit City
That's not what is meant by "high-tech" society. Any old country can import consumer goods and sell them in some store. What's typically meant is high-tech infrastructure and public facilities.
The rest of your rant about the benefits of cheap US gas and wide open spaces--well, Europe can't really help having less real estate. Kudos to the US for the wide open spaces and the NEED for cheap gas to roam around in them, I guess.
> How is your fancy stove with a microprocessor better
This is Slashdot, not a bohemian lifestyle forum, so that's a bit of an irrelevant question. Besides, why replace an old oven/stove that works perfectly? Because ovens and stoves crud up beyond anyone's ability to clean them nicely after 10-20 years of use. Because most people don't take their stove with them when moving to a new house. Because there comes a time in every (wo)man's life when (s)he is placed in the situation of requiring a new stove. Because of entropy.
If I were that far off with my comment IKEA wouldn't be laughing all the way to the bank with their sales of imported kitchens. And imported appliances to go with them would be an unknown thing.
> Why use a picture message when a text message is so much clearer
Because a picture says a thousand words?! Just kidding. I think the industry has shown a phenomenal lack of foresight with UMTS. The writing has been on the wall for over a decade that the trend is towards integrated services--everything over one pipe, hail TCP/IP and open standards. The slate was clean, they could have gone for the grand slam of moving to IP phones and leaving proprietary protocols behind. With time and extra spectrum it could have grown into one seamless wireless cloud of phone, video, data, radio and TV connectivity. No more proprietary technologies for all the various things going over the air. Instead, we got UMTS. Oh well.
> home appliances in the US are vastly superior
That's funny, I (and most people I know that have experienced both) think the opposite. American stoves and ovens are extremely crude, with controls and looks straight out of the 50s. Washing machines are even worse--practically everything you buy here in the states is driven by a mechanical program wheel, hardly any microprocessor driven washing machines at all. And they all use water like there's no tomorrow. Of course, water being much cheaper than in Europe, that doesn't matter as much. Fridges OTOH are nice and big in the US--not technologically more advanced, but bigger. Of course, since you HAVE to shop for a week at a time (given that the supermarket is half a fuel tank away), that makes sense. Even so, when living in Europe I could have always done with a larger fridge.
Overall, on average I'd say that living in Europe you tend to come into more contact with high-tech stuff than in the US: smart-card driven public phones, fancy ticket vending machines, automated public transportation, cell-phone-driven vending machines, etc. While you find some of this stuff in the US, it tends to be less prevalent. Of course, Japan has us way beaten on all of that stuff, but hey!
> so infrastructure changes there can and will proceed significantly faster
Not at all. Places like Japan or most European countries have virtually 100% coverage of the entire country, meaning that there is a sh*tload of infrastructure--just in a much tighter space. In fact, it would be interesting to see a comparison of the total number of cell towers deployed in the entire US versus some of these European countries or Japan. I doubt you'd see an order of magnitude difference.
A company is developing a plasma taser that sends an electric shock through a charged aerosol cloud that it sprays towards the victim. See Yahoo for English article, or Spiegel for German article with picture. All under the heading of non-leathal weapons.
> In Canada, the T68i is the top of the line.
They don't sell the P800 there?
> When you have a PDA and a laptop [...] better have a network.
Can a phone pair with more than one device at a time for network access? I haven't actually played with Bluetooth yet.
> the ultra high-end SonyEricsson T68i at 450$ CDN
Well, not THAT ultra high-end, there are several models with more functionality that are more expensive. Plus, lately it's being discounted because SE is bringing out a successor with (what else?) a camera. You can find it on Amazon for $99 with a $100 rebate from T-Mobile. I'm tempted at the moment to get it, except for point two below.
> How about the cost of a Bluetooth PDA?
Exactly. To me, the PDA plus a few key devices (phone, storage, access point or PC integration) could be the Bluetooth killer app, if only anyone seriously pushed into the market as other than just a high-end checklist item. For example, I can get a BT Memory Stick card for my (cheap) Clie--but only from Europe or Asia for over $100, because Sony never targeted the US market for some reason. I'm certainly not going to spend more on the BT card than on my PDA and phone combined, and yet it would be an incredibly useful combination.
Of course, that also brings me to this ridiculous obsession with smaller and smaller memory media formats, which merely make it more difficult and expensive to integrate into the form factor the sorts of things people REALLY want to add on: communications and cameras, it seems. But that's another story...
As the standard issue field jukebox--except, of course, in the traditional red.
> And Danish, and Swedish...
True enough, I was just alluding to Disney's blatant (and royalty-free) plagiarazing of the Grimm brothers. Whose stories, of course, were not of exclusively German origins.
> And for f**ks sake, what is American pop culture??
A mix of German fairy tales, carbonated beverages, and African-influenced music.
Incidentally, the disaster would most likely have occured even if helium had been used, since the fire started with the highly flammable aluminum powder-coated skin. Maybe fewer people would have died or burned, since the fire wouldn't have spread quite so quickly into the interior, but it would probably have gone down anyway.
> this is the engine technology that could very well power future cars
Don't think so. The trend is firmly in the direction of fuel cells and electric drive. The world is moving more and more into a solid state direction--more computers, less moving parts--because less mechanical complexity means more reliability and lower price (well, theoretically anyway). The overall achievable system efficiency of fuel cells and high efficiency electric motors is also considerably higher than what you can get with ICEs.
This is not to say that BMW is necessarily wasting their time with hydrogen burning engines. A considerable portion of the effort is devoted to hydrogen infrastructure and storage R&D, and that will be required long term regardless of which engine technology wins. Hydrocarbon fuel cells are only a medium-term stopgap measure anyway, it's not what you will want to be using in one hundred years. Pure hydrogen seems like the most likely long term energy carrier.
At least in the US cell carriers love being in total control of "their" hardware. So even if you have a very powerful hardware platform capable of doing MP3/GPS/browsing, the networks might limit what you can do with it within some artifical pricing model that extracts money from you for any useful bit of computing you perform with it. I'm thinking of some of the current Java phones that have no local means of synchronization and require you to go through the carrier for uploading any apps into the phone--for a price.
Death, taxes, and Sony forever pushing new proprietary formats. You'd think that Pavlovian learning would have set in by now.
And I think the PDA makers have neglected this potentially huge market for way too long. Only now we're starting to get a trickle of PDAs with integrated wireless (Bluetooth or 802.11), whereas that could have been THE killer app for handhelds from day one. They concentrated for too long on WAN-type wireless, which until recently didn't have the infrastructure to do right (with GPRS it's finally getting there), while base-station-type home networking could have been done for a long time and would have been enough for a lot of people. As others have said, who wants to get up from in front of the TV and walk to the PC (probably in another room) to look up something, or carry a hot and heavy notebook on their lap, when you could just whip out the PDA and do the same thing? Let's face it, other than for commuting times most people spend most of their day within potential range of a base station, at home or at work.
On that note, I've also been getting frustrated with this obsession for smaller and smaller memory card formats. While these slots were always primarily intended for add-on memory, the reality is that an almost even more important use is for communications expansion, since most PDAs nowadays have adequate memory but inadequate connectivity. And it's simply a lot harder to pack especially new multi-chip technology into a SD or MS form factor than into a relatively roomier CF card. After all, the size of the card is hardly the limiting factor for the size of the PDA. Then again, with the trend of putting everything into new PDAs, after you've got a camera, BT, WiFi, GPRS modem and GPS receiver in there, maybe there's not much expanding left to do. Ah well...
Don't anyone get blinded by the facts now. After some quick googling, pages such as this will easily be found:
u lfwar
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/gulf.war/facts/g
Check at the bottom, under "The Cost". While Kuwait and Saudi Arabia paid the lion's share, I just listed France and Germany (plus Japan) because they're the ones being daemonized by the US, even though they contributed more financially to the first Gulf War than the US.
> The reconstruction [...] is being paid for primarily out of the pockets of the US taxpayers.
Really? Let's wait and see until it's all said and done, and--like the first time around--it will probably be most everyone else EXCEPT the US bearing the costs. See, that way they get the best of both worlds: they get the PR and get to pooh-pooh France and Germany, and then France and Germany (and Japan) will be the ones paying anyway, except without getting the credit. And France and Germany will be "happy" again that the "tensions" with Washington will be over. Who said international politics wasn't fun?