So one cracked solder joint made the entire plane unflyable?
Not at all. It made it a bit annoying, as if you had a phone beeping about a text message while you're driving. The pilots acted like a distracted teenager - it's a recurring theme.
You're looking at it all wrong. Never mind that RoHS has shit to do with avionics.
The real issue is: a simple, non-critical hardware problem leads to a 100% human-precipitated failure cascade that amounts to an uncontrolled flight into terrain all the while the airframe and the supporting systems offer you a perfectly flyable, if perhaps a bit annoying, aircraft.
The broken solder joint was a distraction, like getting a text message while you drive the car. The pilots reacted like an absent-minded american teenager would. The cracked solder joint just put some badly needed light on the human problem.
the manual provided by the plane's manufacturer said the aircraft, an Airbus 320, was designed to prevent it from becoming upset and therefore upset recovery training was unnecessary
This is patently false. Fly-by-wire planes have multiple levels of degraded flight envelope protections, predicated by degraded sensor inputs, lost redundancies, etc. All of this is in the fucking manuals, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Stalls that initiate at high altitudes and continue all the way to the ground are a recurring problem and the pilots are to be blamed. If you're in any sort of a plane and there's no reaction to prolonged stick-up input, you have to let go and figure out what the fuck is happening. A mental reset, if you will. Perhaps people who are too easily confused by flight automation shouldn't fly the damn planes.
These days, BLE 4 headphone solutions are single-chip, some even have a battery charger included and truly require only a few external components for a complete system.
Say what you will, but at the moment Apple devices running iOS are the only mobile platform that runs VSTs and routes midi in an easy-to-use fashion. Windows Phone doesn't do it, Android doesn't do it. If you want to get a lot of bang for your buck, buy a couple VST apps from the app store, a USB midi controller, USB-to-lightning "camera" adapter, and off you go. It works great, is trivial to set up (there is none, really), and iOS is the de-facto standard for such things. I'd say it's a lot of bang for my buck compared to buying obsolete keyboards/synths at exorbitant prices and having to service the damn things myself.
I have never had a low-lag experience with Bluetooth audio and Apple devices. Perhaps the technology doesn't allow it, but somehow every Apple device I use with wireless audio will delay the audio output by ~0.2 seconds. This makes it completely useless for live playing. With a hardwired connection to the headphones, I can use an iPhone 6 with 2-3 instrument apps running in the background, a programmable midi controller in the foreground, hook up my keyboard through the lightning camera adapter, and jam. The lag is not noticeable - iOS has a very good, low-latency midi/audio system that supports VSTs very well. If they drop wired audio connections, they better offer a wireless interface that has very low lag or else they'll anger the audio market. VSTs on Android are a joke...
I've been looking at some of the prices the auctions start at, and they can be ridiculous. This is mostly used merchandise, and some items it list for more than the same or comparable item would cost new if I just went to the store to buy it. Many prices are very reasonable, though.
Gosh, your battery is dead, you have to buy a whole new device.
I don't know where you live, but within 10 miles of me there is literally a dozen places, not related to the device manufacturer, where they'll gladly replace my non-user-serviceable battery for me, for a reasonable price. Or I can just get a kit from iFixIt or whatnot.
The video card on your lap top is flakey? What a shame, time to buy an entirely new machine.
Laptops with video cards are like one in a million on a good day. For the rest of us, there's no such thing as a "video card" in a laptop. It's called the main board or logic board, and sure as heck is replaceable!. No need for an "entirely new machine".
Hate to burst your bubble, but it's already here. I'm using a Dell SK-8115 keyboard with my mac. Works perfectly fine. Same for Apple keyboards and PCs.
With the most recent Clover UEFI bootloader, it's more and more a case of plug-and-play with OS X on supported non-Apple hardware. It even installs from the original install media now.
...or at least make the freaking things not blink like crazy when I'm trying to sleep. Say what you wish about Apple, but at least they have figured it out and use light intensity ramps instead of ON/OFF patterns. I can put the macbook on the night table and be able to fall asleep without having to cover its LED. The HP printer, OTOH, had me look for an old floppy disk erase-disable tab sticker. The perfectly opaque sticker was a necessity given the absurd amount of light the indicator was giving off.
I'm almost certain that the article is in fact a set up piece that is there only to plant a seed of doubt in the hive mind of public opinion. I'm sure that if we do the due diligence it'll turn out that the article has been, very indirectly of course, made to be by the people who will later reap the benefits of extortion schemes that center on those with implanted medical devices. I'm not implying that the author is necessarily knowingly involved in this in any way, but merely has been artfully played by those who see the big picture. You don't need to actually do anything to the devices themselves, just steal a patient list or two from a poorly secured system somewhere, and send a bulk extortion email with a link to the fine article (and others like that) to bolster the legitimacy of the threat. If the author hasn't been played in any way, then the damage is still done: the scammers just got a great idea they'll no doubt literally capitalize on.
Why in hell is a pacemaker something accessible in any way to a random malware distributor?
Because it's a programmable electronic device and they are all accessible to sufficiently sophisticated malware by definition. There's no way around that unless everything that ever accessed the device was completely air-gapped, self-contained and hardened. Note that this would also preclude any sort of data I/O with PCs etc., making the whole thing almost useless.
have never had the ability or need to talk to the internet
They still don't. Read the original article carefully, and be able to rationally separate wheat from chaff, or, as it is here, sensationalist bullshit.
How about we don't put a network chip on a pacemaker, dumbasses.
How about you don't take stupid fear-mongering from an inept "journalist" at face value? Pacemakers don't have a "network" chip or anything like that. They have a near-field communications system that can communicate with dedicated programming/data capture terminal. It makes little sense for any kind of ransomware on what amounts to a mostly offline device, where the owner doesn't have any means of accessing the data link or exposing it as an on-line node.
Inkscape and GIMP are similar here in that you don't need to port all of glib to Qt. Only the UI. The core, at least in case of Inkscape, uses glib heavily and GObject isn't really QObject. The two had different design goals and are used differently. The biggest problem in both gimp and Inkscape is the fact that they are written in C or C-compiled-with-C++, pretty much. We have these comparatively big desktop apps written as if it was 1995 and compilers were stupid...
The terrain is never a problem if you have the will and money for a fast train infrastructure. They'll build elevated tracks, tunnels and ditches to keep the going smooth.
With majority of cars being self-driving, existing road infrastructure will become so efficient that there'll be little incentive for anyone to desire an off-road vehicle - whether one that flies, goes on water, underground, on rails, etc. Road-based transportation systems only get congested because of human drivers. The same ones that argue that driving is a pleasure to them and that they'll give up manual driving over their dead bodies. As far as I'm concerned - good riddance. They want to make my life miserable for their please so fuck them.
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So one cracked solder joint made the entire plane unflyable?
Not at all. It made it a bit annoying, as if you had a phone beeping about a text message while you're driving. The pilots acted like a distracted teenager - it's a recurring theme.
You're looking at it all wrong. Never mind that RoHS has shit to do with avionics.
The real issue is: a simple, non-critical hardware problem leads to a 100% human-precipitated failure cascade that amounts to an uncontrolled flight into terrain all the while the airframe and the supporting systems offer you a perfectly flyable, if perhaps a bit annoying, aircraft.
The broken solder joint was a distraction, like getting a text message while you drive the car. The pilots reacted like an absent-minded american teenager would. The cracked solder joint just put some badly needed light on the human problem.
the manual provided by the plane's manufacturer said the aircraft, an Airbus 320, was designed to prevent it from becoming upset and therefore upset recovery training was unnecessary
This is patently false. Fly-by-wire planes have multiple levels of degraded flight envelope protections, predicated by degraded sensor inputs, lost redundancies, etc. All of this is in the fucking manuals, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Stalls that initiate at high altitudes and continue all the way to the ground are a recurring problem and the pilots are to be blamed. If you're in any sort of a plane and there's no reaction to prolonged stick-up input, you have to let go and figure out what the fuck is happening. A mental reset, if you will. Perhaps people who are too easily confused by flight automation shouldn't fly the damn planes.
First life hands one comedy gold, and then you hand that to us with some platinum sprinkles on top. Hats off, my day has been made. Thank you!
Grado, Audiotechnica, and many others simply do not have a funny little iphone connector, and likely never will.
Given that Apple mobile devices are probably a half of what their consumer products attach to, you must be kidding yourself.
These days, BLE 4 headphone solutions are single-chip, some even have a battery charger included and truly require only a few external components for a complete system.
Say what you will, but at the moment Apple devices running iOS are the only mobile platform that runs VSTs and routes midi in an easy-to-use fashion. Windows Phone doesn't do it, Android doesn't do it. If you want to get a lot of bang for your buck, buy a couple VST apps from the app store, a USB midi controller, USB-to-lightning "camera" adapter, and off you go. It works great, is trivial to set up (there is none, really), and iOS is the de-facto standard for such things. I'd say it's a lot of bang for my buck compared to buying obsolete keyboards/synths at exorbitant prices and having to service the damn things myself.
I have never had a low-lag experience with Bluetooth audio and Apple devices. Perhaps the technology doesn't allow it, but somehow every Apple device I use with wireless audio will delay the audio output by ~0.2 seconds. This makes it completely useless for live playing. With a hardwired connection to the headphones, I can use an iPhone 6 with 2-3 instrument apps running in the background, a programmable midi controller in the foreground, hook up my keyboard through the lightning camera adapter, and jam. The lag is not noticeable - iOS has a very good, low-latency midi/audio system that supports VSTs very well. If they drop wired audio connections, they better offer a wireless interface that has very low lag or else they'll anger the audio market. VSTs on Android are a joke...
I've been looking at some of the prices the auctions start at, and they can be ridiculous. This is mostly used merchandise, and some items it list for more than the same or comparable item would cost new if I just went to the store to buy it. Many prices are very reasonable, though.
You do musical analogies pretty damn well. Thank you!
SO/SE are definitely not forums and aren't supposed to be used that way. They are Q&A sites, not discussion sites.
Gosh, your battery is dead, you have to buy a whole new device.
I don't know where you live, but within 10 miles of me there is literally a dozen places, not related to the device manufacturer, where they'll gladly replace my non-user-serviceable battery for me, for a reasonable price. Or I can just get a kit from iFixIt or whatnot.
The video card on your lap top is flakey? What a shame, time to buy an entirely new machine.
Laptops with video cards are like one in a million on a good day. For the rest of us, there's no such thing as a "video card" in a laptop. It's called the main board or logic board, and sure as heck is replaceable!. No need for an "entirely new machine".
Hate to burst your bubble, but it's already here. I'm using a Dell SK-8115 keyboard with my mac. Works perfectly fine. Same for Apple keyboards and PCs.
With the most recent Clover UEFI bootloader, it's more and more a case of plug-and-play with OS X on supported non-Apple hardware. It even installs from the original install media now.
The LED is immaterial. The power supply is still there, and while on standby it's consuming way more power than the LED is.
...or at least make the freaking things not blink like crazy when I'm trying to sleep. Say what you wish about Apple, but at least they have figured it out and use light intensity ramps instead of ON/OFF patterns. I can put the macbook on the night table and be able to fall asleep without having to cover its LED. The HP printer, OTOH, had me look for an old floppy disk erase-disable tab sticker. The perfectly opaque sticker was a necessity given the absurd amount of light the indicator was giving off.
I'm almost certain that the article is in fact a set up piece that is there only to plant a seed of doubt in the hive mind of public opinion. I'm sure that if we do the due diligence it'll turn out that the article has been, very indirectly of course, made to be by the people who will later reap the benefits of extortion schemes that center on those with implanted medical devices. I'm not implying that the author is necessarily knowingly involved in this in any way, but merely has been artfully played by those who see the big picture. You don't need to actually do anything to the devices themselves, just steal a patient list or two from a poorly secured system somewhere, and send a bulk extortion email with a link to the fine article (and others like that) to bolster the legitimacy of the threat. If the author hasn't been played in any way, then the damage is still done: the scammers just got a great idea they'll no doubt literally capitalize on.
Why in hell is a pacemaker something accessible in any way to a random malware distributor?
Because it's a programmable electronic device and they are all accessible to sufficiently sophisticated malware by definition. There's no way around that unless everything that ever accessed the device was completely air-gapped, self-contained and hardened. Note that this would also preclude any sort of data I/O with PCs etc., making the whole thing almost useless.
have never had the ability or need to talk to the internet
They still don't. Read the original article carefully, and be able to rationally separate wheat from chaff, or, as it is here, sensationalist bullshit.
you'd do something like put a wifi or bluetooth chip in a medical device
If you're talking about pacemakers specifically, you're just making shit up. Please stop.
How about we don't put a network chip on a pacemaker, dumbasses.
How about you don't take stupid fear-mongering from an inept "journalist" at face value? Pacemakers don't have a "network" chip or anything like that. They have a near-field communications system that can communicate with dedicated programming/data capture terminal. It makes little sense for any kind of ransomware on what amounts to a mostly offline device, where the owner doesn't have any means of accessing the data link or exposing it as an on-line node.
Inkscape and GIMP are similar here in that you don't need to port all of glib to Qt. Only the UI. The core, at least in case of Inkscape, uses glib heavily and GObject isn't really QObject. The two had different design goals and are used differently. The biggest problem in both gimp and Inkscape is the fact that they are written in C or C-compiled-with-C++, pretty much. We have these comparatively big desktop apps written as if it was 1995 and compilers were stupid...
So, you say that flying cars are the only solution, then? /s
The terrain is never a problem if you have the will and money for a fast train infrastructure. They'll build elevated tracks, tunnels and ditches to keep the going smooth.
With majority of cars being self-driving, existing road infrastructure will become so efficient that there'll be little incentive for anyone to desire an off-road vehicle - whether one that flies, goes on water, underground, on rails, etc. Road-based transportation systems only get congested because of human drivers. The same ones that argue that driving is a pleasure to them and that they'll give up manual driving over their dead bodies. As far as I'm concerned - good riddance. They want to make my life miserable for their please so fuck them.
Never mind finally giving some substance to the "islamic science is the foundation of our modern world" myth.