I took the liberty and snipped from your answers left and right, hope you don't mind:
!!!"Thus, the projects we're going to undertake are more like helping a business set up an ecommerce presence or a wireless WAN than teaching basic email skills."
???Funny, the WAN was actually something that I was thinking of, but I could not resolve who would provide the financing for this. I am talking about a WAN to farmers or for education. What does the government in Ghana say to that, are they willing/going to support you for *such* infrastructure projects(pilot stage)
!!!"Ghana's an interesting example of a country in transition - most of the population lives in rural areas and work as subsistence farmers, but there's a large migration to urban areas and a need for high-paying jobs to support these migrants. No, most folks aren't going to come from a village and land a job doing web design... but they might find jobs working for a factory that's expanding... because it's suddenly selling products to a wider world market... because someone's helped them set up an ecommerce presence and fulfillment system. This is realistic in Ghana because the government has substantially liberalized telecommunications law, allowing ISPs to operate and ordinary individuals to get relatively inexpensive phone lines. (Not the case in much of the world.)"
??? Hmm(always good for a bad beginning<g>). I see you being able to help them to develop skills to setup ebiz centres and so on, so I see the supply side here, but then I have a problem seeing the demand side. Who is going to buy what? Are you thinking of the international markets when you are talking about ebiz, or domestic ones? What kind of e-business shall that be? I can see a huge software development centre and web designers and so too, but I have a problem with anything physical(transportation costs). So is one of your visions to have a software centre there? Develop the domstic e-conomy?
Some things that I think would be interesting:
a) software and web development centre b) practical seminars at university level(how to install a server, linux123, networks[practical useable stuff that theydon't learn at the uni]), you might have a more efficient and wider reach and they will surely welcome a foreign expert with hands on experience c) convince the government to officially commit to a tech zone and d) talk to biggies to start investing over there, even if starting only with a small office for outsourcing software development. It is a chain, if this starts, small companies that will supply them will come and so on and so on e) increase efficiency of the government bureaucracy using IT f) if you are going to go for helping subsistence farmers and their villages try cooperating with econ academics(email me if you are interested, could get you some contacts that are just working on informational issues and developing countries)
Have you talked to the Ghana government, what are they thinking about this, from my experience this has often been crucial to projects in the third world.
Get the third world programming! Skip the Industrial Revolution. This could work. Hmm...:) Some peoples' wages I see going down:)
What about some of the unix pros here(did I say some? ooh my god) helping you guys by designing a unix distribution that is optimized to run on extremely low spec computers?(maybe something like this already exists and I don't know about it??) Or do you already have something in mind yourself? If something like this already exists, please drop me a link, I have been looking for something like that. -k13
I don't see those two points missed, besides the first one being bs from my point of view and irrelevant. (btw I would like to know where you read this about the UK government.)
You say, ecommerce is good for the third world because they can get their goods cheaper.(right?) Good, let's tear that apart:
1.) They don't have the purchasing power for buying stuff and would only waste their time browsing goods that they cannot afford(overgeneralisation)
2.) How shall pay their goods(even if they have the money)? Do they have ecash systems or credit cards? Have you every lived in one developing country? especially in the rural areas? Then you might know that there very often are NO banks(which is actually one of THE biggest problems, the inefficient and restricted credit and money market) You could try starting a click-click barter system interesting concept..hmmm
3.) Have you ever heard parcel delivery to the 5th hill on the right behind the second water fall on the left? No UPS does NOT deliver to those countries very well. Maybe the US will attach you books from Amazon on their next cruise missile if you happen to life next to a chemical plant.
I think that it is always a nice thing when humans try to help other humans, but I am not entirely sure what geekcorps wants to achieve. It seems that they want to help local businesses and help them get onto the inet. Funny that is, who would be able to buy anything from them when noone has inet access(now we are talking about really far away future earnings<g>). Internetcafes are nice, but will, unless properly adminstered be used for gaming, which will also not help the economy.
Even when considering latest economic research, evidence is inconclusive and not entirely on the side of more information equals better living standards. From geekcorps webpage you can't exactly figure out, what they are up to. Having read some of the development economics papers, it seems that there have been positive relations between enabling them to access to the following kind of sites(incomplete, but you get the notion): news(which many don't have in their villages and towns) crop and farming information(what kind of seeds, best strategies against shocks, how to build up credit systems on a village basis,..) social, political and job education(there are actually a few NGOs I think, that are trying this right now)
What did not seem to be useful is to let them get lost in cyberspace browsing around for hours at amazon&co:)
The Internet by itself will IMHO not help developing countries a great lot, until they can enhance their productivity(which is actually possible), educate people(which is also possible) and let them communicate with the outside world(which most of them have and will never see/experience, being bound to their countries/villages for all their life), which will hopefully open their minds and initiate/support democratic thinking and values of the people in those countries. The problem it seems has very often been to get Internet access to the villages, service the computers, governments(the inet challenges some of their views, take for instance China) and who is going to pay for all this. Just to throw something into the discussion here, some people believe, that after having been left out of the Industrial Revolution, that the Third World, might be able to join the Information(Internet) Revolution and simply skip the step to fully developed industrial countries. This is an interesting point and I think that it might be possible for some countries or better regions, but that this won't be a general solution. Looking at India, which has a few software development hotspots, taking the country as a whole, the Inet has not changed very much, besides inducing dreaming about becoming an inet millionaire, for some of the cs students. Most of the ppl still live in poverty and neither has the inet changed the trend of the population, namely upwards(by 2030 they are supposed to overtake China, according to the UNpop) Before bla-ing anymore along, I would like to know, what exactly it is that geekcorps will be doing and whether they are planning to help ppl use the inet or get local business into the net(if the later is the case, I doubt they have thought enough about all this).
Considering the latest developments in countries like Zimbabwe(was down there just 3 months ago<g>) I would make sure that there are not some nice coup d'etats&co cooking...would give the name Internet Revolution a totally new meaning(you would be very fast revolutionizing your geek ass again out of that country)
What is NETPD doing? Well, my guess is hot air and causing problems, not only for napster, but also for the RIAA and any sueing aritsts. Let's start like from what we know: -they are using a program that is based on AI(???) -they are vulnerable to changes by Napster -anything else that we know for sure? I don't think so, AFAIK they have collected the user names of the different users. If, as some have said/written, they have also collected the IPs, they must have decoded the protocol, right? I don't think that they had enough time, even if they had traced all users back to the originating servers (though I do not know why they needed to do a visualized traceroute for this, I guess they used some existing SW programs for the demo to make it more TV-like), to get the warrants from the police to extract the real names. This is especially true for international users. So this cannot have been the case. Otherwise a lot of us would have heard about this and would have posted it here. Don't forget we are talking about 300kppl, they would have had to check. Ok, so let's try to figure out how they got the list and what might be on there(even though a short tel call to napster might resolve the issue). So what did the NETPD guys do? My guess is, that all this was !very! easy. One possibility is that they used a modified/patched Napster(would again go against the licence agreement) to do searches for Metallica and then do extract the user names including the IPs . No AI here and no AI anywhere else:) Or they analyzed the protocol and build their own client for querying the Napster Servers. They probably had those programs up and running for a few days and collected user names that showed Metallica files when they searched for them. No magic anywhere. Ways to counter all this: -change the protocols and change the Napster client, encrypt the search results and make their programs more diffficult to crack(I know there is no uncrackable program, once you have it in your hands, but you could make it way more difficult for them to make a user list assembler and if you change the programs often enough, say once a week, they will have problems tracking the current users) -reset all user names every 2nd day or don't use user names at all, just give them a number at log in(you are nr 382793 today) -update their licence agrement, making it illegal for anyone to reverse engineer the program or protocol and putting up fines for using the results of the rev engineering -using shell accounts(usual problems) -using anonymizer variant for napster -using freenet,aol free 50h accounts etc. -Napster switching to anonymizing users, e.g. putting up different servers through which all the packets(download/upload) would be routed with no logs in place. -there sure are more, put those are the ones out of the top of my head(which is tired and still has work to do) So was there magic, no. AI? no. Could most of us have done what netpd has done? yes. Where is the problem for the record industry? Well, I don't know for sure, but I think that they have to proove that the files that were copied were not only named Metallica(this was also pointed out before) but would also be Metallica MP3s. I don't know of any way how they could do this, especially now, 20days after the list was probably compiled. The RPS(=Rights Protection System) which is going to be forced on e.g. all German ISPs, is useless against Napster. They could as well not implement the whole RPS and ground the whole project, as Napster is 10x easier to use then finding webpages/servers with your music on. What are they going to do, if Napster would be moving its servers to another country and register there? Say a country that has no record industry and no close associaton with the US, than they would have BIG problems. I agree with one writer before that wrote that in his view RIAAllica:) does not want to go after the individual users, but wants to shut down Napster. For them it is not about the peanuts that they are loosing now, but about all their revenue streams. If those systems succeed and are easy in use/accessible for everyone, than they are dead. This is what Napster was providing the world with, the axe to slay RIAAllica. RIAAllica will try everything to get them shot to the moon or somewhere where they won't be able to connect to the inet, but as the system and the idea is out, we are going to see many more Napsters/Gnutellas out there and many more tries by the RIAAllica to counter them. So what will happen? Will Napster be bought by Sony to be used for their distribution system? Something like this is already being developed and have a look at mp3exchanger.com they seem to be building something like this. hope this was not too boring:)
Since when can civilians use the military signal? I don't think that even geologists can do that:) You probably using DGPS or the Russian system additionally to the GPS.
what kind of accuracy do you need for harbour approaches? As a pilot you want to hit the runwayand I don';t see a prob anymore with 4m EPE but with a ship that goes real slowly and 4m accuracy, what is the problem?
damn...incredible how cheap they are in the US. Th Emap, I think, is the most expensive one and costs around 500USD in Europe. III+ has a moving map too, even though the emap is more advaned for "home" use.
I don't know but this seems kind of strange...adiplomat driving around with a military grade GPS to get the coordinates for bomb runs, in a city? I don't think so. A city has 2571 fix points which are well known and can therefore be used to help the sat maps, you don't need any diplomats running around. Besides the GPS was ONLY used in Kosovo b/c the weather was that bad and infrared missiles and land shape recognition systems did not work. Additionally AFAIK the GPS did not do the homing in on the last meters but was used for the long distance navigation, anyone has a comment on that, that's at least what I was told by some ppl that were down there....could be wrong
Ok guys, so instead of waiting an longer I went to sleep and got up in the morning(live in London) and went on the roof of the house I am living in, all those tall building don't do GPS to well as it is line of sight. I took out my Garmin III+ and switched it on: 6 satelites 6m EPE 9 satellites 4m EPE / 1.2 DOP This is fantastic! Older readings of my system with 9 satellites had 15m PEP if you were really really lucky and did not move! some more stats: 4 sats 2 good and 2 real bad: 19m EPE/ DOP 4.2 this was something like 50m This is also very interesting as you often have/had problems when being in the mountains or dense forrest and did not have the "ideal" line of sight, therefore living only on 3-4 sats. I mean now we are talking, with an accuracy of 4m you can do very good navigation(maybe not the ship docking stuff, even though I recon if you add some other sensors for the last meters this should not be an issue either) for instrument approached in planes it will also work, AFAIK, I mean it even worked before cause I used it a lot for that when there are no documented apporach patterns(as is often the case with small airports or airstrips), and as long as the runway is not to narrow and the plane too big(mum can I take the Jumbo today...No stay with your C172...buhuu). So next time when you take your C172 into JFK, no worries to ATC you got GPS.... Another VERY nice by-result is, that the alitude will and is way more accurate. We alwayws said that the alitude error is 3 times the PEP error, so if you were about 25m where youwere supposed to be long/lat you were about 75m where you were supposed to be when talking for da 3rd dimension which is kind of fuzzy...this will help a lot of mountaineers... enjoy it all!!!! DOP is an internal measure of the Garmins, that is directly correlated to the EPE(=Estimated Point of Error), which is uses for juding the signal quality and reception.
two ways to get more accurate data, though I have never used them myself, but they deliver sub-meter accuracy: 1) differential is not averaging but using another transmitter(not GPS sats, can be a radio) to get increased accuracy, b/c you know that this one is not distorted. Works very well, the US coast guard uses it and it is also used in the Aegeis where they simply but up another radio transmitter on an island to be able to stir more accurately around seom cliffs. In Germany and Europe they even use the radio signal of the caesium clock in Braunschweig? 2) use the Russian system additionally to the GPS system, some European receivers can read them both.
Interesting point, but I don't think that this was their primary objective:) More that the Europeans are disincentivized of shooting up their own system, which AFAIK are going to decide soon upon. So this was just in time. Considering the Russian competitor, I have heard that they already had some serious problems with their satelites, the money shortage story again...anyone has more news on that, naturally they don't have anything on this on their page:) Eagerly waiting to try out my III+ without SA...
Look at the garmin at magellan pages. Especially the Garmins are great. They are using them for flying and anything you can imagine. I used the III+ for some expeditions and they work very well. They have the some of the newest tech, as posted before, the have moving maps which you can download and update from a CD(which you have to buy for expensive dolllarez). From what I have seen and heard, they are some of the most common used ones for desert expeditions(Sahara/Kalahari) and are extremely reliable+have a rugged design so that they even work when they fall in stupid salt water(and the even more stupid l00ser has to get it out again[no I don't liike diving]) As you can get them around 400-500USD in Europe, you should be able to get them cheaper in the US, saw them already on a few retailer pages. But beware, only buy them in the US if you are going to use them mainly in the US. If you want them back to Europe, it's a no no as you have to buy the Country/European map in which you want to use it primarily. Great that we have been healed of SA:)
Slashdot Mirror
US+Canada+Mexico = NAFTA
not many tariffs out there....
thanks a lot.
Ethan, nice job replying that fast!
I took the liberty and snipped from your answers left and right, hope you don't mind:
!!!"Thus, the projects we're going to undertake are more like helping a business set up an ecommerce presence or a wireless WAN than teaching basic email skills."
???Funny, the WAN was actually something that I was thinking of, but I could not resolve who would provide the financing for this. I am talking about a WAN to farmers or for education. What does the government in Ghana say to that, are they willing/going to support you for *such* infrastructure projects(pilot stage)
!!!"Ghana's an interesting example of a country in transition - most of the population lives in rural areas and work as subsistence farmers, but there's a large migration to urban areas and a need for high-paying jobs to support these migrants. No, most folks aren't going to come from a village and land a job doing web design... but they might find jobs working for a factory that's expanding... because it's suddenly selling products to a wider world market... because someone's helped them set up an ecommerce presence and fulfillment system. This is realistic in Ghana because the government has substantially liberalized telecommunications law, allowing ISPs to operate and ordinary individuals to get relatively inexpensive phone lines. (Not the case in much of the world.)"
??? Hmm(always good for a bad beginning<g>). I see you being able to help them to develop skills to setup ebiz centres and so on, so I see the supply side here, but then I have a problem seeing the demand side. Who is going to buy what? Are you thinking of the international markets when you are talking about ebiz, or domestic ones? What kind of e-business shall that be?
I can see a huge software development centre and web designers and so too, but I have a problem with anything physical(transportation costs). So is one of your visions to have a software centre there? Develop the domstic e-conomy?
Some things that I think would be interesting:
a) software and web development centre
b) practical seminars at university level(how to install a server, linux123, networks[practical useable stuff that theydon't learn at the uni]), you might have a more efficient and wider reach and they will surely welcome a foreign expert with hands on experience
c) convince the government to officially commit to a tech zone and
d) talk to biggies to start investing over there, even if starting only with a small office for outsourcing software development. It is a chain, if this starts, small companies that will supply them will come and so on and so on
e) increase efficiency of the government bureaucracy using IT
f) if you are going to go for helping subsistence farmers and their villages try cooperating with econ academics(email me if you are interested, could get you some contacts that are just working on informational issues and developing countries)
Have you talked to the Ghana government, what are they thinking about this, from my experience this has often been crucial to projects in the third world.
Get the third world programming!
Skip the Industrial Revolution.
This could work.
Hmm...:)
Some peoples' wages I see going down:)
-k13
What about some of the unix pros here(did I say some? ooh my god) helping you guys by designing a unix distribution that is optimized to run on extremely low spec computers?(maybe something like this already exists and I don't know about it??) Or do you already have something in mind yourself? If something like this already exists, please drop me a link, I have been looking for something like that. -k13
I don't see those two points missed, besides the first one being bs from my point of view and irrelevant. (btw I would like to know where you read this about the UK government.)
You say, ecommerce is good for the third world because they can get their goods cheaper.(right?)
Good, let's tear that apart:
1.) They don't have the purchasing power for buying stuff and would only waste their time browsing goods that they cannot afford(overgeneralisation)
2.) How shall pay their goods(even if they have the money)? Do they have ecash systems or credit cards? Have you every lived in one developing country? especially in the rural areas? Then you might know that there very often are NO banks(which is actually one of THE biggest problems, the inefficient and restricted credit and money market) You could try starting a click-click barter system interesting concept..hmmm
3.) Have you ever heard parcel delivery to the 5th hill on the right behind the second water fall on the left? No UPS does NOT deliver to those countries very well. Maybe the US will attach you books from Amazon on their next cruise missile if you happen to life next to a chemical plant.
-k13
I think that it is always a nice thing when humans try to help other humans, but I am not entirely sure what geekcorps wants to achieve. It seems that they want to help local businesses and help them get onto the inet.
Funny that is, who would be able to buy anything from them when noone has inet access(now we are talking about really far away future earnings<g>). Internetcafes are nice, but will, unless properly adminstered be used for gaming, which will also not help the economy.
Even when considering latest economic research, evidence is inconclusive and not entirely on the side of more information equals better living standards. From geekcorps webpage you can't exactly figure out, what they are up to.
Having read some of the development economics papers, it seems that there have been positive relations between enabling them to access to the following kind of sites(incomplete, but you get the notion):
news(which many don't have in their villages and towns)
crop and farming information(what kind of seeds, best strategies against shocks, how to build up credit systems on a village basis,..)
social, political and job education(there are actually a few NGOs I think, that are trying this right now)
What did not seem to be useful is to let them get lost in cyberspace browsing around for hours at amazon&co:)
The Internet by itself will IMHO not help developing countries a great lot, until they can enhance their productivity(which is actually possible), educate people(which is also possible) and let them communicate with the outside world(which most of them have and will never see/experience, being bound to their countries/villages for all their life), which will hopefully open their minds and initiate/support democratic thinking and values of the people in those countries.
The problem it seems has very often been to get Internet access to the villages, service the computers, governments(the inet challenges some of their views, take for instance China) and who is going to pay for all this.
Just to throw something into the discussion here, some people believe, that after having been left out of the Industrial Revolution, that the Third World, might be able to join the Information(Internet) Revolution and simply skip the step to fully developed industrial countries.
This is an interesting point and I think that it might be possible for some countries or better regions, but that this won't be a general solution. Looking at India, which has a few software development hotspots, taking the country as a whole, the Inet has not changed very much, besides inducing dreaming about becoming an inet millionaire, for some of the cs students. Most of the ppl still live in poverty and neither has the inet changed the trend of the population, namely upwards(by 2030 they are supposed to overtake China, according to the UNpop)
Before bla-ing anymore along, I would like to know, what exactly it is that geekcorps will be doing and whether they are planning to help ppl use the inet or get local business into the net(if the later is the case, I doubt they have thought enough about all this).
Considering the latest developments in countries like Zimbabwe(was down there just 3 months ago<g>) I would make sure that there are not some nice coup d'etats&co cooking...would give the name Internet Revolution a totally new meaning(you would be very fast revolutionizing your geek ass again out of that country)
-k13
Your PDFs seem to be corrupt. Can't download them properly
What is NETPD doing? Well, my guess is hot air and causing problems, not only for napster, but also for the RIAA and any sueing aritsts. Let's start like from what we know: -they are using a program that is based on AI(???) -they are vulnerable to changes by Napster -anything else that we know for sure? I don't think so, AFAIK they have collected the user names of the different users. If, as some have said/written, they have also collected the IPs, they must have decoded the protocol, right? I don't think that they had enough time, even if they had traced all users back to the originating servers (though I do not know why they needed to do a visualized traceroute for this, I guess they used some existing SW programs for the demo to make it more TV-like), to get the warrants from the police to extract the real names. This is especially true for international users. So this cannot have been the case. Otherwise a lot of us would have heard about this and would have posted it here. Don't forget we are talking about 300kppl, they would have had to check. Ok, so let's try to figure out how they got the list and what might be on there(even though a short tel call to napster might resolve the issue). So what did the NETPD guys do? My guess is, that all this was !very! easy. One possibility is that they used a modified/patched Napster(would again go against the licence agreement) to do searches for Metallica and then do extract the user names including the IPs . No AI here and no AI anywhere else:) Or they analyzed the protocol and build their own client for querying the Napster Servers. They probably had those programs up and running for a few days and collected user names that showed Metallica files when they searched for them. No magic anywhere. Ways to counter all this: -change the protocols and change the Napster client, encrypt the search results and make their programs more diffficult to crack(I know there is no uncrackable program, once you have it in your hands, but you could make it way more difficult for them to make a user list assembler and if you change the programs often enough, say once a week, they will have problems tracking the current users) -reset all user names every 2nd day or don't use user names at all, just give them a number at log in(you are nr 382793 today) -update their licence agrement, making it illegal for anyone to reverse engineer the program or protocol and putting up fines for using the results of the rev engineering -using shell accounts(usual problems) -using anonymizer variant for napster -using freenet,aol free 50h accounts etc. -Napster switching to anonymizing users, e.g. putting up different servers through which all the packets(download/upload) would be routed with no logs in place. -there sure are more, put those are the ones out of the top of my head(which is tired and still has work to do) So was there magic, no. AI? no. Could most of us have done what netpd has done? yes. Where is the problem for the record industry? Well, I don't know for sure, but I think that they have to proove that the files that were copied were not only named Metallica(this was also pointed out before) but would also be Metallica MP3s. I don't know of any way how they could do this, especially now, 20days after the list was probably compiled. The RPS(=Rights Protection System) which is going to be forced on e.g. all German ISPs, is useless against Napster. They could as well not implement the whole RPS and ground the whole project, as Napster is 10x easier to use then finding webpages/servers with your music on. What are they going to do, if Napster would be moving its servers to another country and register there? Say a country that has no record industry and no close associaton with the US, than they would have BIG problems. I agree with one writer before that wrote that in his view RIAAllica:) does not want to go after the individual users, but wants to shut down Napster. For them it is not about the peanuts that they are loosing now, but about all their revenue streams. If those systems succeed and are easy in use/accessible for everyone, than they are dead. This is what Napster was providing the world with, the axe to slay RIAAllica. RIAAllica will try everything to get them shot to the moon or somewhere where they won't be able to connect to the inet, but as the system and the idea is out, we are going to see many more Napsters/Gnutellas out there and many more tries by the RIAAllica to counter them. So what will happen? Will Napster be bought by Sony to be used for their distribution system? Something like this is already being developed and have a look at mp3exchanger.com they seem to be building something like this. hope this was not too boring:)
Since when can civilians use the military signal? I don't think that even geologists can do that:) You probably using DGPS or the Russian system additionally to the GPS.
what kind of accuracy do you need for harbour approaches? As a pilot you want to hit the runwayand I don';t see a prob anymore with 4m EPE but with a ship that goes real slowly and 4m accuracy, what is the problem?
damn...incredible how cheap they are in the US. Th Emap, I think, is the most expensive one and costs around 500USD in Europe. III+ has a moving map too, even though the emap is more advaned for "home" use.
I don't know but this seems kind of strange...adiplomat driving around with a military grade GPS to get the coordinates for bomb runs, in a city? I don't think so. A city has 2571 fix points which are well known and can therefore be used to help the sat maps, you don't need any diplomats running around. Besides the GPS was ONLY used in Kosovo b/c the weather was that bad and infrared missiles and land shape recognition systems did not work. Additionally AFAIK the GPS did not do the homing in on the last meters but was used for the long distance navigation, anyone has a comment on that, that's at least what I was told by some ppl that were down there....could be wrong
Ok guys, so instead of waiting an longer I went to sleep and got up in the morning(live in London) and went on the roof of the house I am living in, all those tall building don't do GPS to well as it is line of sight. I took out my Garmin III+ and switched it on: 6 satelites 6m EPE 9 satellites 4m EPE / 1.2 DOP This is fantastic! Older readings of my system with 9 satellites had 15m PEP if you were really really lucky and did not move! some more stats: 4 sats 2 good and 2 real bad: 19m EPE/ DOP 4.2 this was something like 50m This is also very interesting as you often have/had problems when being in the mountains or dense forrest and did not have the "ideal" line of sight, therefore living only on 3-4 sats. I mean now we are talking, with an accuracy of 4m you can do very good navigation(maybe not the ship docking stuff, even though I recon if you add some other sensors for the last meters this should not be an issue either) for instrument approached in planes it will also work, AFAIK, I mean it even worked before cause I used it a lot for that when there are no documented apporach patterns(as is often the case with small airports or airstrips), and as long as the runway is not to narrow and the plane too big(mum can I take the Jumbo today...No stay with your C172...buhuu). So next time when you take your C172 into JFK, no worries to ATC you got GPS.... Another VERY nice by-result is, that the alitude will and is way more accurate. We alwayws said that the alitude error is 3 times the PEP error, so if you were about 25m where youwere supposed to be long/lat you were about 75m where you were supposed to be when talking for da 3rd dimension which is kind of fuzzy...this will help a lot of mountaineers... enjoy it all!!!! DOP is an internal measure of the Garmins, that is directly correlated to the EPE(=Estimated Point of Error), which is uses for juding the signal quality and reception.
I was pondering about the same....maybe they are using EST, after all it's the US:) Or the calendar date change, so another 10:30 hours or so....
two ways to get more accurate data, though I have never used them myself, but they deliver sub-meter accuracy: 1) differential is not averaging but using another transmitter(not GPS sats, can be a radio) to get increased accuracy, b/c you know that this one is not distorted. Works very well, the US coast guard uses it and it is also used in the Aegeis where they simply but up another radio transmitter on an island to be able to stir more accurately around seom cliffs. In Germany and Europe they even use the radio signal of the caesium clock in Braunschweig? 2) use the Russian system additionally to the GPS system, some European receivers can read them both.
So what exactly was the accuracy you had at the time of the gulf war compared your usualy accuracy? What kind of systems fo you use? thanks!
Chief Geodesist what a title:)
Interesting point, but I don't think that this was their primary objective:) More that the Europeans are disincentivized of shooting up their own system, which AFAIK are going to decide soon upon. So this was just in time. Considering the Russian competitor, I have heard that they already had some serious problems with their satelites, the money shortage story again...anyone has more news on that, naturally they don't have anything on this on their page:) Eagerly waiting to try out my III+ without SA...
Look at the garmin at magellan pages. Especially the Garmins are great. They are using them for flying and anything you can imagine. I used the III+ for some expeditions and they work very well. They have the some of the newest tech, as posted before, the have moving maps which you can download and update from a CD(which you have to buy for expensive dolllarez). From what I have seen and heard, they are some of the most common used ones for desert expeditions(Sahara/Kalahari) and are extremely reliable+have a rugged design so that they even work when they fall in stupid salt water(and the even more stupid l00ser has to get it out again[no I don't liike diving]) As you can get them around 400-500USD in Europe, you should be able to get them cheaper in the US, saw them already on a few retailer pages. But beware, only buy them in the US if you are going to use them mainly in the US. If you want them back to Europe, it's a no no as you have to buy the Country/European map in which you want to use it primarily. Great that we have been healed of SA:)