Actually, most western projects I end up working on these days consist of an army of managgers and a couple of coders. The coders are so specialised they can't be outsourced, i.e., AVS scripting for OpenLink Endur (mostly because of the detailed application knowledge needed). The work cannot be outsourced and there isn't any 'general pool' of developers now that can transition to the specialised apps because that general pool are all Indians in Chennai and Bangalore and they are too far away from the business.
They are definitely not poor and live very good lives. A substantial number of them have been to the U.S. on work visas (they love wallmart) and when I asked which country they prefer they all like India better. Which flabbergasts me because in Chennai even the natives don't drink the tap water. But home is home.
First of all a little money goes a lot further in India but most importantly, family comes first. If you have a good job, you are expected to help out not so well off relatives.
There is now a phenomenon known as positive lightning. It is much more rare but can happen away from the main cloud as the bolt goies from the cloud top to the ground. The thing is that this is much more powerful and there has been at least one validated incident of it happening to a sailplane causing it to break-up in mid air. Normally sailplanes are quite lightning proof too, but not this time.
OTOH there could be a strike on the weather radar - two sets but they share the same front end in the nose where most strikes occur. Sure it doesn't stop you flying, but if you are in a lot of thunderheads at night, you no longer know where the nastiest up/down draughts are. I don't know whether this would have been shown by the maintenance system.
Second, Between 35000 feet and the ground, there is plenty of time for the crew to broadcast a message. If I am not mistaken, you don't actually need to hold down a button while radioing anymore.
They were outside VHF range so they had to go to HF. HF has a lot of issues next to Thunderstorms. and in the ICTZ in general. Funnily enouigh, until the plane starts getting into very strange positions, the passengers can talk quite nicely to their nearest and dearest via INMARSAT. However the phones are often switched off when there is a lot of turbulence in case they interfere with the controls.
Often it is a combination of factors. For example during a recent air-crash at Perm in Russia, the full report has been published and is available in English. The crash occured because the plane had an issue with the auto-throttle which should have been disabled. When the pilot in charge was trying to manage the air-speed there was a good 20 deg between the throttle levers required to have equal thrust on both sides. The lack of knowledge about the plane (it was a Boeing and the tech docs are in English and Russian pilots on internal flights were not required to be proficient in English) and the possible presence of alcohol in one of the pilot's bodies meant that the remaining pilot could not cope properly with the extra workload at a critical part of the flight. If the weather was good, and the plane working properly the pilots wouldn't have crashed the plane. If the pilots were better trained, then also they may have managed the problem better.
That was cabin crew - not flight crew and the stress of a long haul for the flight crews is more down to boredom than anything else. The real problem happens every day as a plane is suffled around an airlines national network often with the same flightcrew. Like the planes, the stress comes withg takes-offs and landiings and with 5-7 cycles over a 14 hour day - that is hard work. With a three man crew on a modern two-main plane one can take time off to rest during cruise.
Scheduled maintenance happens generally when it is supposed to for western airlines. If a plan has a technical fault, it may be fixed where it is at a much higher price or brought home. There can be a lot of pressure to bring a plane home (with pax) and fix it there. Some US airlines have been guilty in the past of wanting to fly a plane back to the US when the local inspectors have said that the plane wasn't airworthy - this would end up being escalated through the FAA and ususally the local inspectors cave.
OTOH, to be betamaxed, as in undermined by an inferior technology with better marketing was certainly terminology I've heard in the last ten years and a long time after the eighties when the war actually happened.
If you use professionally built DVB-T capable tuners, say a USB stick from Hauppauge then the license fee was paid for by them. Your reimplementation of the software is covered. You may have trouble distributing it as you will need software implementations of patented decoders, but its already happening with MythTV and there are no problems there at the moment. The problem comes if you implement it on top of something like a software radio.
DAB sucks with a bitrate of about 128Kb/s with an MP2 codec, less than a standard analog FM station . There is a newer standard called DAB+ which uses AAC+ with effectively double the bit rate for half the bandwidth. Some DAB receivers may be firmware upgradable but for the rest, tough. DAB+ looks like it may be going European (as well as being adopted by Australia). The thing is that as you can drive with the use of a Car Ferry from Scotland down to Italy in the same car but it would rather suck if your radio stopped working at high quality.
The trick with liquid binary explosives is getting them not to blow up as you're mixing them. But this is not a problem, really, if you're a suicide bomber.
Except if the mix was only partial when the detonation occurred, the explosive power could be drastically reduced.
Arguably, Gerry Adams was never really even a terrorist, he was just on the political wing of an organisation that had terrorist connections. That is SInn Fein, never shot at anyone or bombed anyone. Gerry Adams political affiliations were well known as well as the fact that he was travelling under his own name.
Absolutely and it runs Internet Explorer, the world's most compatible web browser running everything thrown at it and supporting important standards like Active-X.
Yep, air-con is a serious consumer of power, but I'm living in central Europe at the moment so we don't often have it, let alone use it in domestic premises. Shops, hotels and some other businesses may use it.
Power for the retail customer here seems to be the same over a 12 month period. For a serious user, the power price comes down to whatever you manage to negotiate. The price is set in hourly chunks and is negotiated up to several months ahead.
EU countries for example, have the reverse engineering exemption. If we have te right to use data, we can use whatever technical means to get at that data including reverse engineering for interoperability. The US doesn't like this and has been trying to force a change but it seems that it isn't going to happen.
Cern is not EU, a bit like ESA there are some connections but it gets funds independently from all participants (who don't really even have to be European). and the contracts are awarded roughly according to the buy-in from your host country. The big stuff tends for practical reasons be limited to France and Switzerland but other countries can provide smaller assemblies.
My electric does not cost significantly more during the winter.
Actually your supplier is paying differing amounts for power because at wholesale level, it is demand driven.
For the others and their fun with speculation, my heat is paid for out of my monthly association fees, and it's a gas bill, not electric.
Again, as you use gas, so does everybody else and not only does your consumption increase when the weather cools down, but the overall demand pushes the price of gas up. Since some power is gas generated, that pushes the price of gas up.
We live on the edge of a small city and our heat is the waste from power generation which ends up at our heat exchanger at 80C. As with most retail customers we end up paying a fixed amount over the year with the annual price being set against a coal and gas index.
We're talking about, what, a 9 billion dollar facility? They're worried about the power bill?
Normally any major user of power factors in their running costs which unlike ours tend to be demand driven. If other people want the power, then the cost goes up (the wholesale price is typically set hourly). Major users may decide to adjust schedules to reduce costs where sensible. In my understanding CERN experiments once built are divided into two phases, data collection and analysis. Peak power is needed during data collection as you have the beam on.and being accelerated. During analysis, you just need to maintain the cryo-electromagnets and the vacuum. Probably much less power.
I am currently working in IT at the trading arm of a major European energy supplier. Large variations in seasonal power demands are normal. Major consumers often attempt to hedge their consumption on the market (they may also link to the weather indices as one element is clearly ambient temperature).
Normally, reserves have to be used over the winter peaks. One of Cern's suppliers, EDF uses a lot of nuclear but that tends to run at a fairly constant rate. Power tends to get balanced by the use of hydroelectric systems (paired reservoirs coupled through pump/generators) but these tend to be good for hours at best. There are higher-cost emergency power systems based on things like gas which can come on line in minutes. Anyway, normally Cern would close for maintenance over winter but one of the side effects of the depression and with factories working at lower capacity is, of course, cheaper electricity.
Here the numbers are rather more obvious with hundreds of thousands apparently going to the each of the main camps. In the US, much smaller numbers were involved. The trucks go in full and come out empty.
Line of sight. You must stay within line of sight of the aircraft, and you also must be able to take control of the aircraft in an emergency.
Funnily enough that doesn't seem to apply for unpowered model aircraft. I used to know people who would launch uncontrolled model gliders and then chase them. They often went out of sight so recovery was a challenge.
Is this relevant? If the plane is flying under supervision and is below a certain size. Gas-turbines are a no-no unless you are under controlled conditions. Full autopilot and powered seems to be a no-no but there doesn't seem to be anything against FPV flight though - and the autopilot rules seems quite flexible so auto-stabilisation seems to be ok. Even the size rules seem to be flexible considering some of the multi-engined monsters that have flown.
Funnily enough, you can get some not-quite milspec stuff from these people and they specialise in things like miniature GPS receivers and 3 axis accelerometers. It might not handle the deserts or the tundra but will handle normal conditions without problems. There are even projects that use these for autopilots for model sailplanes and airplanes. Sure the GPS receiver in the Raven may have better interference rejection and be able to use the military GPS channel, but for accuracy you can always use DGPS relative to your base and for interference rejection, upwards facing antennas help a lot.
This article discusses bunch of Brazilians have been caught using an expensive ($1K), but still hobbyist, stripped down r/c helicopter to airlift 9 mobile phones to prison inmates. I was also very surprised as I thought the payload, particularly on amateur planes/copters usually wasn't worth a damn. There is a photo of the helicopter and the bodywork has been removed, presumeably to reduce the weight.
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Actually, most western projects I end up working on these days consist of an army of managgers and a couple of coders. The coders are so specialised they can't be outsourced, i.e., AVS scripting for OpenLink Endur (mostly because of the detailed application knowledge needed). The work cannot be outsourced and there isn't any 'general pool' of developers now that can transition to the specialised apps because that general pool are all Indians in Chennai and Bangalore and they are too far away from the business.
First of all a little money goes a lot further in India but most importantly, family comes first. If you have a good job, you are expected to help out not so well off relatives.
There is now a phenomenon known as positive lightning. It is much more rare but can happen away from the main cloud as the bolt goies from the cloud top to the ground. The thing is that this is much more powerful and there has been at least one validated incident of it happening to a sailplane causing it to break-up in mid air. Normally sailplanes are quite lightning proof too, but not this time.
OTOH there could be a strike on the weather radar - two sets but they share the same front end in the nose where most strikes occur. Sure it doesn't stop you flying, but if you are in a lot of thunderheads at night, you no longer know where the nastiest up/down draughts are. I don't know whether this would have been shown by the maintenance system.
They were outside VHF range so they had to go to HF. HF has a lot of issues next to Thunderstorms. and in the ICTZ in general. Funnily enouigh, until the plane starts getting into very strange positions, the passengers can talk quite nicely to their nearest and dearest via INMARSAT. However the phones are often switched off when there is a lot of turbulence in case they interfere with the controls.
Often it is a combination of factors. For example during a recent air-crash at Perm in Russia, the full report has been published and is available in English. The crash occured because the plane had an issue with the auto-throttle which should have been disabled. When the pilot in charge was trying to manage the air-speed there was a good 20 deg between the throttle levers required to have equal thrust on both sides. The lack of knowledge about the plane (it was a Boeing and the tech docs are in English and Russian pilots on internal flights were not required to be proficient in English) and the possible presence of alcohol in one of the pilot's bodies meant that the remaining pilot could not cope properly with the extra workload at a critical part of the flight. If the weather was good, and the plane working properly the pilots wouldn't have crashed the plane. If the pilots were better trained, then also they may have managed the problem better.
That was cabin crew - not flight crew and the stress of a long haul for the flight crews is more down to boredom than anything else. The real problem happens every day as a plane is suffled around an airlines national network often with the same flightcrew. Like the planes, the stress comes withg takes-offs and landiings and with 5-7 cycles over a 14 hour day - that is hard work. With a three man crew on a modern two-main plane one can take time off to rest during cruise.
Scheduled maintenance happens generally when it is supposed to for western airlines. If a plan has a technical fault, it may be fixed where it is at a much higher price or brought home. There can be a lot of pressure to bring a plane home (with pax) and fix it there. Some US airlines have been guilty in the past of wanting to fly a plane back to the US when the local inspectors have said that the plane wasn't airworthy - this would end up being escalated through the FAA and ususally the local inspectors cave.
Thanks for the correction, you are quite right. I think I meant effective bit rate (due to the better encoding).
OTOH, to be betamaxed, as in undermined by an inferior technology with better marketing was certainly terminology I've heard in the last ten years and a long time after the eighties when the war actually happened.
If you use professionally built DVB-T capable tuners, say a USB stick from Hauppauge then the license fee was paid for by them. Your reimplementation of the software is covered. You may have trouble distributing it as you will need software implementations of patented decoders, but its already happening with MythTV and there are no problems there at the moment. The problem comes if you implement it on top of something like a software radio.
DAB sucks with a bitrate of about 128Kb/s with an MP2 codec, less than a standard analog FM station . There is a newer standard called DAB+ which uses AAC+ with effectively double the bit rate for half the bandwidth. Some DAB receivers may be firmware upgradable but for the rest, tough. DAB+ looks like it may be going European (as well as being adopted by Australia). The thing is that as you can drive with the use of a Car Ferry from Scotland down to Italy in the same car but it would rather suck if your radio stopped working at high quality.
Except if the mix was only partial when the detonation occurred, the explosive power could be drastically reduced.
Arguably, Gerry Adams was never really even a terrorist, he was just on the political wing of an organisation that had terrorist connections. That is SInn Fein, never shot at anyone or bombed anyone. Gerry Adams political affiliations were well known as well as the fact that he was travelling under his own name.
Absolutely and it runs Internet Explorer, the world's most compatible web browser running everything thrown at it and supporting important standards like Active-X.
.
/Meant in the same spirit as Spambot 0wner....
Yep, air-con is a serious consumer of power, but I'm living in central Europe at the moment so we don't often have it, let alone use it in domestic premises. Shops, hotels and some other businesses may use it.
Power for the retail customer here seems to be the same over a 12 month period. For a serious user, the power price comes down to whatever you manage to negotiate. The price is set in hourly chunks and is negotiated up to several months ahead.
EU countries for example, have the reverse engineering exemption. If we have te right to use data, we can use whatever technical means to get at that data including reverse engineering for interoperability. The US doesn't like this and has been trying to force a change but it seems that it isn't going to happen.
Cern is not EU, a bit like ESA there are some connections but it gets funds independently from all participants (who don't really even have to be European). and the contracts are awarded roughly according to the buy-in from your host country. The big stuff tends for practical reasons be limited to France and Switzerland but other countries can provide smaller assemblies.
Actually your supplier is paying differing amounts for power because at wholesale level, it is demand driven.
Again, as you use gas, so does everybody else and not only does your consumption increase when the weather cools down, but the overall demand pushes the price of gas up. Since some power is gas generated, that pushes the price of gas up.
We live on the edge of a small city and our heat is the waste from power generation which ends up at our heat exchanger at 80C. As with most retail customers we end up paying a fixed amount over the year with the annual price being set against a coal and gas index.
Normally any major user of power factors in their running costs which unlike ours tend to be demand driven. If other people want the power, then the cost goes up (the wholesale price is typically set hourly). Major users may decide to adjust schedules to reduce costs where sensible. In my understanding CERN experiments once built are divided into two phases, data collection and analysis. Peak power is needed during data collection as you have the beam on.and being accelerated. During analysis, you just need to maintain the cryo-electromagnets and the vacuum. Probably much less power.
I am currently working in IT at the trading arm of a major European energy supplier. Large variations in seasonal power demands are normal. Major consumers often attempt to hedge their consumption on the market (they may also link to the weather indices as one element is clearly ambient temperature).
Normally, reserves have to be used over the winter peaks. One of Cern's suppliers, EDF uses a lot of nuclear but that tends to run at a fairly constant rate. Power tends to get balanced by the use of hydroelectric systems (paired reservoirs coupled through pump/generators) but these tend to be good for hours at best. There are higher-cost emergency power systems based on things like gas which can come on line in minutes. Anyway, normally Cern would close for maintenance over winter but one of the side effects of the depression and with factories working at lower capacity is, of course, cheaper electricity.
Here the numbers are rather more obvious with hundreds of thousands apparently going to the each of the main camps. In the US, much smaller numbers were involved. The trucks go in full and come out empty.
Funnily enough that doesn't seem to apply for unpowered model aircraft. I used to know people who would launch uncontrolled model gliders and then chase them. They often went out of sight so recovery was a challenge.
Unlikely unless the UAV is big and/or it has an obvious gas turbine in it.
Is this relevant? If the plane is flying under supervision and is below a certain size. Gas-turbines are a no-no unless you are under controlled conditions. Full autopilot and powered seems to be a no-no but there doesn't seem to be anything against FPV flight though - and the autopilot rules seems quite flexible so auto-stabilisation seems to be ok. Even the size rules seem to be flexible considering some of the multi-engined monsters that have flown.
Funnily enough, you can get some not-quite milspec stuff from these people and they specialise in things like miniature GPS receivers and 3 axis accelerometers. It might not handle the deserts or the tundra but will handle normal conditions without problems. There are even projects that use these for autopilots for model sailplanes and airplanes. Sure the GPS receiver in the Raven may have better interference rejection and be able to use the military GPS channel, but for accuracy you can always use DGPS relative to your base and for interference rejection, upwards facing antennas help a lot.
This article discusses bunch of Brazilians have been caught using an expensive ($1K), but still hobbyist, stripped down r/c helicopter to airlift 9 mobile phones to prison inmates. I was also very surprised as I thought the payload, particularly on amateur planes/copters usually wasn't worth a damn. There is a photo of the helicopter and the bodywork has been removed, presumeably to reduce the weight.