If you look at the picture in the article, the plate is on a flat area, not a downhill ramp. Supermarket car parks are highly notable for not being built on hillsides.
It's likely because Microsoft will soon hold patents (they have outstanding patent applications) on technologies that Mono includes. Given that Microsoft has openly declared themselves as being the arch-enemy of Linux, it seems foolish to make Linux distributions depend on a technology that Microsoft owns - because if programs depending on Mono get popular to such an extent the Linux desktop now heavily depends on it, Microsoft can just turn around and destroy Linux on the desktop with a patent lawsuit.
Additionally, Mono will always trail.NET, and will always be the poor second class relation of.NET if you're trying to develop cross platform programs. On the other hand, despite its faults, you're still a first class Java citizen if you use Java on Linux - you're not playing catch-up to some other implementation of Java. You have the same, complete implementation that everyone else has.
I'm sure Mono is very good, but at the moment it contains a fairly fatal legal flaw which renders it dangerous to free software.
Furthermore, this is boosted by the fact that by the time the legal system remedies the illegal actions, the competitors who Microsoft "cut of the air supply" to have long since been bankrupted - so the legal remedy is kind of moot. They pay a fine, but they still have a monopoly in the new market because they destroyed all the competitors long before the case was actually heard in court - because it took five years to get there.
It's the main stream media, it's doubtful the makers of the program even bothered to check their "facts" - they just published what sounded sensational.
Remember this whenever you read a news story - remember how inaccurate the stories about the Hudson ditching was, then think "is this story as inaccurate as that one?" before getting wound up about it...because it very probably is.
This entirely untrue. In GA (light aircraft) the egress rate from ditchings is 90% - that is, 90% survive the ditching well enough to get out of the aircraft. Most of the fatalities are caused by hypothermia - the pilot/passengers not equipped to survive what comes *after* a successful ditching - bobbing around in cold water for a long time.
In large aircraft, there haven't been a whole lot of water landings, but there have been numerous notable ones where everyone got out. The first one I can think of is a Boeing Stratoliner (piston airliner) that went into the Pacific, and everyone got out. More recently, due to pilot error, a Boeing 707 crashed into Lake Victoria in Africa (the crew got below the glideslope at night, and landed in the lake). Everyone got off that one too - the plane took surprisingly little damage and even floated for a while. There was also a Boeing 767 that was hijacked in the mid 90s, which ran out of fuel and ended up in a lake. This one wasn't so good - it touched down in about 20 degrees of bank so a wingtip dug into the water first and the plane broke up - but still, 50 of the passengers survived. Many of those who died (around 80 of the passengers) did so because they inflated their lifejackets before exiting the aircraft, and were trapped as the aircraft sank; they survived the actual ditching.
A very badly informed comment though - it's actually so wrong it isn't even wrong.
Boeing use both fly by wire and composites. The B777 is full fly by wire, just like the Airbus (The B777 is a great aircraft - very reliable, with no fatal crashes to date - only one has crashed - no one was seriously hurt - due to fuel contamination). The B787, which is Boeing's next model, is almost *entirely* composite - it's the first airliner to be primarily composite construction. It is due to enter service in 2010 (and has suffered some delays). Oh, and it's fly by wire too, naturally.
Composites are also much stronger than aluminium - it is no accident that high performance gliders have been made from composites since the 1970s - you can't make gliders with such a slender wing as something like any open class glider - huge long 25 meter plus wingspans, with very little chord - with aluminium. The best aluminium gliders were the designs by Richard Schreider in the late 1960s - he brought aluminium to its limits in the design of high performance gliders. Composites also have other advantages - you can make much more efficient shapes with them too.
I think that in general, you are arguably better off when the pilots are connected to the flight surfaces via manual controls. Even if the power and hydraulics go out with enough strength you may move some control surfaces a little - perhaps enough to control a plane in level flight - maybe even land it.
But if FBW shits itself - you are TOAST.
But you are not connected by manual controls in anything bigger than a 737. Only in smaller airliners, like the Boeing 737, do you have any connection to the flight control surfaces. The B737 is like just a very large GA airplane - it has steel cables going to the control surfaces (except the rudder). The control surfaces are merely hydraulically boosted, a bit like power steering. If the hydraulics fail, you can still fly the plane by tugging on the controls.
But in anything bigger this is NOT the case. If the hydraulics all fail in a B747 for example, you have NO control of the flight control surfaces (Google for the JAL crash in the 1980s when a B747 lost the vertical stabilizer and all hydraulic systems). Or a DC-10 for that matter - this has happened with the DC-10 (google Sioux City DC-10) when all three hydraulic systems were fractured by the disintegration of a turbine disc in the #2 engine (the one on the tail). The widebody jets are all like this - either hydraulic or fly by wire.
Furthermore, since this was an A300, it's not in remotely the same automation ballpark as AF447. The A300 is an aircraft that dates from 1972, and works just like Boeings of the same era - all mechanical/hydraulic controls and NOT fly by wire.
It's a myth that all Airbus aircraft are fly-by-wire. The older ones are not. (The first fly by wire airliner was Concorde which entered service a few years after the A300. But Concorde's fly by wire system was analogue).
You're remembering a false rumour. Furthermore, the engines actually performed slightly better than was predicted, and the crew had takeoff thrust slightly earlier than they would otherwise expect - but due to the lag in how long it takes a turbofan to spool up from near idle to takeoff thrust, by the time the engines were at takeoff thrust, the tail was already dragging through the trees.
A 100mph vertical gust at the speed the aircraft was operating at would be sufficient to cause structural damage.
It's not unknown for airliners to break up in thunderstorms - it doesn't happen often, but it does happen - most recently to a Russian airliner in 2006.
And another which was linked by barrapunto.com (Slashdot's Spanish sistersite) where a Spanish A340 captain related encountering a sudden large increase in temperature while flying through similar weather years earlier, when he was B747 captain - a change in temperature from -48C to -19C, which immediately put them 15 tonnes overweight for the altitude they were at, leaving them firmly in "coffin corner" - he surmised if he had remained on autopilot, they would be today keeping AF447 company at the bottom of the ocean.
Or would you rather spend all day making up SHOCKING headlines for articles like, "Police do their job. Bring in suspect for questioning, and then release him after innocence proven."
Actually, that would be shocking. The burden of proof is not on the suspect, but on the accusers. You don't get to prove your innocence, the law has to prove your guilt. A system of innocent until proven guilty, not guilty until proven innocent.
It seems like the mean time from lab to the shops for battery technologies is more like 10 to 15 years. (That's about how long it took Li-Ion to go from the lab to your laptop).
If the battery has a sufficiently high C rating, it'd be great for electric radio controlled helicopters and planes. At the moment, the battery pack on my T-Rex 500 heli lasts only about 8 minutes and is quite large (a pair of 2100mAh 35C three cell LiPoly batteries). Getting only twice that charge for the same weight of battery pack would make a tremendous difference.
Google didn't pay 1.65bn, they actually paid most of the price using their highly overhyped and overinflated stock. So they were paying for one overinflated stock with another overinflated stock - net result, nothing of value was lost and most of that 1.65bn was actually notional and didn't really exist as such.
I have to wonder what kind of phone you have, when I had Nokia's cheapest model, it happily strung text messages together with no problems at all. In either direction. This was in 2002, long before the "Jesus phone" or things like it.
Re:"Only" two remote holes in 10 years?
on
OpenBSD 4.5 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
That's a bad example - Apache is shipped as part of the core OpenBSD system and therefore a hole in Apache as shipped with OpenBSD *would* count.
Oh, no government does take pro-active action, but only when it comes to spying on people - for example, creating identity databases, demanding that all your communications are recorded, installing cameras everywhere!
But it's trivially easy to make a Cat5 patch cable that works fine up to gigabit speeds. I've made countless cables (usually when we need a custom length RIGHT NOW, such as a 10m crossover cable, and there's not time to wait for an order to come in) - all work at 100M, and now gigabit speeds.
On the other hand, in this instance his boss is right; given that he's getting an upgrade to a T1 line, it's probably at least a week or two before the telco does the upgrade, therefore he's got time just to order a ready made 20m cable which will be cheaper, take less of his time, and will likely come with a warranty. (And he doesn't need cat6 anyway, a normal Cat5e cable is sufficient for gigabit speeds).
Masers operate at infra-red frequencies (the M being for Microwave) - i.e. frequencies below that of visible light. This is operating at X-ray frequencies, i.e. with wavelengths measured in angstroms, not in micrometers.
1000base-T only has a symbol rate of 125Mbaud (the same as 100baseTX). Note that 125Mbaud does not mean 125MHz. For example, 100baseTX only has a fundamental frequency of 31.25 MHz due to the way the signal is generated (it uses a three level non return to zero line code - i.e. +1, 0 and -1). 1000base-T uses a 5 level signalling scheme (+2, +1, 0 -1, -2). A proper cat5 installation is entirely adequate for gigabit ethernet.
Contrast this with 10baseT which uses Manchester encoding, with a signalling frequency of 20MHz (twice the data rate!)
I've found Cisco kit to often try to be "too clever" when autonegotiating, and do a job far worse than a $30 unmanaged workgroup switch. Fortunately, (as you did) you can turn off autonegotiation. The only time we've had speed negotiation problems, it's been with enormously expensive Cisco switches.
Generally the way you make the power supplies for LEDs, a failure closed circuit won't be like you say. Typically, an LED illuminator power supply is a current regulating supply, as in you set the current and the voltage takes care of itself (so you can use the same circuit to power 1 LED, or two LEDs in series, or three... or up to the maximum voltage the power supply can provide at its output). So if one LED failed closed circuit, the voltage across the whole string would fall as the current regulator works to maintain the set current.
On a LED array I built, I had exactly this happen - one LED in a series chain failed. But the power supply did its job, and continued maintaining the set current, and the others continued to shine at the correct power level.
LED power illuminators never (or at least, none that I have seen) contain the power supply in the actual illuminator module. The power supply is separate to the LED - it must be thermally isolated from the LED, so the the array heating up doesn't affect the power supply.
Also, LED lighting has hit around 100 lumens per watt (the Luxeon Rebel cool white LEDs peak at about 100 lumens/watt). The colour of the cool white LEDs is also a lot more pleasant than the older "white" LEDs which don't actually look white but pale violet.
Slashdot Mirror
If you look at the picture in the article, the plate is on a flat area, not a downhill ramp. Supermarket car parks are highly notable for not being built on hillsides.
It's likely because Microsoft will soon hold patents (they have outstanding patent applications) on technologies that Mono includes. Given that Microsoft has openly declared themselves as being the arch-enemy of Linux, it seems foolish to make Linux distributions depend on a technology that Microsoft owns - because if programs depending on Mono get popular to such an extent the Linux desktop now heavily depends on it, Microsoft can just turn around and destroy Linux on the desktop with a patent lawsuit.
Additionally, Mono will always trail .NET, and will always be the poor second class relation of .NET if you're trying to develop cross platform programs. On the other hand, despite its faults, you're still a first class Java citizen if you use Java on Linux - you're not playing catch-up to some other implementation of Java. You have the same, complete implementation that everyone else has.
I'm sure Mono is very good, but at the moment it contains a fairly fatal legal flaw which renders it dangerous to free software.
Furthermore, this is boosted by the fact that by the time the legal system remedies the illegal actions, the competitors who Microsoft "cut of the air supply" to have long since been bankrupted - so the legal remedy is kind of moot. They pay a fine, but they still have a monopoly in the new market because they destroyed all the competitors long before the case was actually heard in court - because it took five years to get there.
It's the main stream media, it's doubtful the makers of the program even bothered to check their "facts" - they just published what sounded sensational.
Remember this whenever you read a news story - remember how inaccurate the stories about the Hudson ditching was, then think "is this story as inaccurate as that one?" before getting wound up about it...because it very probably is.
It wouldn't exactly be rocket science to provide a tool to allow the user to choose a browser, download it, and install it.
"no one had survived a water landing"
This entirely untrue. In GA (light aircraft) the egress rate from ditchings is 90% - that is, 90% survive the ditching well enough to get out of the aircraft. Most of the fatalities are caused by hypothermia - the pilot/passengers not equipped to survive what comes *after* a successful ditching - bobbing around in cold water for a long time.
In large aircraft, there haven't been a whole lot of water landings, but there have been numerous notable ones where everyone got out. The first one I can think of is a Boeing Stratoliner (piston airliner) that went into the Pacific, and everyone got out. More recently, due to pilot error, a Boeing 707 crashed into Lake Victoria in Africa (the crew got below the glideslope at night, and landed in the lake). Everyone got off that one too - the plane took surprisingly little damage and even floated for a while. There was also a Boeing 767 that was hijacked in the mid 90s, which ran out of fuel and ended up in a lake. This one wasn't so good - it touched down in about 20 degrees of bank so a wingtip dug into the water first and the plane broke up - but still, 50 of the passengers survived. Many of those who died (around 80 of the passengers) did so because they inflated their lifejackets before exiting the aircraft, and were trapped as the aircraft sank; they survived the actual ditching.
A very badly informed comment though - it's actually so wrong it isn't even wrong.
Boeing use both fly by wire and composites. The B777 is full fly by wire, just like the Airbus (The B777 is a great aircraft - very reliable, with no fatal crashes to date - only one has crashed - no one was seriously hurt - due to fuel contamination). The B787, which is Boeing's next model, is almost *entirely* composite - it's the first airliner to be primarily composite construction. It is due to enter service in 2010 (and has suffered some delays). Oh, and it's fly by wire too, naturally.
Composites are also much stronger than aluminium - it is no accident that high performance gliders have been made from composites since the 1970s - you can't make gliders with such a slender wing as something like any open class glider - huge long 25 meter plus wingspans, with very little chord - with aluminium. The best aluminium gliders were the designs by Richard Schreider in the late 1960s - he brought aluminium to its limits in the design of high performance gliders. Composites also have other advantages - you can make much more efficient shapes with them too.
But you are not connected by manual controls in anything bigger than a 737. Only in smaller airliners, like the Boeing 737, do you have any connection to the flight control surfaces. The B737 is like just a very large GA airplane - it has steel cables going to the control surfaces (except the rudder). The control surfaces are merely hydraulically boosted, a bit like power steering. If the hydraulics fail, you can still fly the plane by tugging on the controls.
But in anything bigger this is NOT the case. If the hydraulics all fail in a B747 for example, you have NO control of the flight control surfaces (Google for the JAL crash in the 1980s when a B747 lost the vertical stabilizer and all hydraulic systems). Or a DC-10 for that matter - this has happened with the DC-10 (google Sioux City DC-10) when all three hydraulic systems were fractured by the disintegration of a turbine disc in the #2 engine (the one on the tail). The widebody jets are all like this - either hydraulic or fly by wire.
Furthermore, since this was an A300, it's not in remotely the same automation ballpark as AF447. The A300 is an aircraft that dates from 1972, and works just like Boeings of the same era - all mechanical/hydraulic controls and NOT fly by wire.
It's a myth that all Airbus aircraft are fly-by-wire. The older ones are not. (The first fly by wire airliner was Concorde which entered service a few years after the A300. But Concorde's fly by wire system was analogue).
You're remembering a false rumour. Furthermore, the engines actually performed slightly better than was predicted, and the crew had takeoff thrust slightly earlier than they would otherwise expect - but due to the lag in how long it takes a turbofan to spool up from near idle to takeoff thrust, by the time the engines were at takeoff thrust, the tail was already dragging through the trees.
A 100mph vertical gust at the speed the aircraft was operating at would be sufficient to cause structural damage.
It's not unknown for airliners to break up in thunderstorms - it doesn't happen often, but it does happen - most recently to a Russian airliner in 2006.
I've seen only two credible theories - one from a meteorologist, which you can read here:
http://www.weathergraphics.com/tim/af447/
And another which was linked by barrapunto.com (Slashdot's Spanish sistersite) where a Spanish A340 captain related encountering a sudden large increase in temperature while flying through similar weather years earlier, when he was B747 captain - a change in temperature from -48C to -19C, which immediately put them 15 tonnes overweight for the altitude they were at, leaving them firmly in "coffin corner" - he surmised if he had remained on autopilot, they would be today keeping AF447 company at the bottom of the ocean.
Actually, that would be shocking. The burden of proof is not on the suspect, but on the accusers. You don't get to prove your innocence, the law has to prove your guilt. A system of innocent until proven guilty, not guilty until proven innocent.
No, it's "Hi, we're from the Government, and we're not happy till you're not happy!"
It seems like the mean time from lab to the shops for battery technologies is more like 10 to 15 years. (That's about how long it took Li-Ion to go from the lab to your laptop).
If the battery has a sufficiently high C rating, it'd be great for electric radio controlled helicopters and planes. At the moment, the battery pack on my T-Rex 500 heli lasts only about 8 minutes and is quite large (a pair of 2100mAh 35C three cell LiPoly batteries). Getting only twice that charge for the same weight of battery pack would make a tremendous difference.
With their revenues, I'm sure they are self-parodying happily all the way to the bank.
Google didn't pay 1.65bn, they actually paid most of the price using their highly overhyped and overinflated stock. So they were paying for one overinflated stock with another overinflated stock - net result, nothing of value was lost and most of that 1.65bn was actually notional and didn't really exist as such.
I have to wonder what kind of phone you have, when I had Nokia's cheapest model, it happily strung text messages together with no problems at all. In either direction. This was in 2002, long before the "Jesus phone" or things like it.
That's a bad example - Apache is shipped as part of the core OpenBSD system and therefore a hole in Apache as shipped with OpenBSD *would* count.
Oh, no government does take pro-active action, but only when it comes to spying on people - for example, creating identity databases, demanding that all your communications are recorded, installing cameras everywhere!
But it's trivially easy to make a Cat5 patch cable that works fine up to gigabit speeds. I've made countless cables (usually when we need a custom length RIGHT NOW, such as a 10m crossover cable, and there's not time to wait for an order to come in) - all work at 100M, and now gigabit speeds.
On the other hand, in this instance his boss is right; given that he's getting an upgrade to a T1 line, it's probably at least a week or two before the telco does the upgrade, therefore he's got time just to order a ready made 20m cable which will be cheaper, take less of his time, and will likely come with a warranty. (And he doesn't need cat6 anyway, a normal Cat5e cable is sufficient for gigabit speeds).
Masers operate at infra-red frequencies (the M being for Microwave) - i.e. frequencies below that of visible light. This is operating at X-ray frequencies, i.e. with wavelengths measured in angstroms, not in micrometers.
1000base-T only has a symbol rate of 125Mbaud (the same as 100baseTX). Note that 125Mbaud does not mean 125MHz. For example, 100baseTX only has a fundamental frequency of 31.25 MHz due to the way the signal is generated (it uses a three level non return to zero line code - i.e. +1, 0 and -1). 1000base-T uses a 5 level signalling scheme (+2, +1, 0 -1, -2). A proper cat5 installation is entirely adequate for gigabit ethernet.
Contrast this with 10baseT which uses Manchester encoding, with a signalling frequency of 20MHz (twice the data rate!)
I've found Cisco kit to often try to be "too clever" when autonegotiating, and do a job far worse than a $30 unmanaged workgroup switch. Fortunately, (as you did) you can turn off autonegotiation. The only time we've had speed negotiation problems, it's been with enormously expensive Cisco switches.
Generally the way you make the power supplies for LEDs, a failure closed circuit won't be like you say. Typically, an LED illuminator power supply is a current regulating supply, as in you set the current and the voltage takes care of itself (so you can use the same circuit to power 1 LED, or two LEDs in series, or three... or up to the maximum voltage the power supply can provide at its output). So if one LED failed closed circuit, the voltage across the whole string would fall as the current regulator works to maintain the set current.
On a LED array I built, I had exactly this happen - one LED in a series chain failed. But the power supply did its job, and continued maintaining the set current, and the others continued to shine at the correct power level.
LED power illuminators never (or at least, none that I have seen) contain the power supply in the actual illuminator module. The power supply is separate to the LED - it must be thermally isolated from the LED, so the the array heating up doesn't affect the power supply.
Also, LED lighting has hit around 100 lumens per watt (the Luxeon Rebel cool white LEDs peak at about 100 lumens/watt). The colour of the cool white LEDs is also a lot more pleasant than the older "white" LEDs which don't actually look white but pale violet.