Lot of good it did you, we're not reading articles about you camping. Oh wait, maybe that's not so bad. Who wants the press hanging around their campsite?:-)
Gee, that's funny -- my walkie-talkies (ham radio, FERN, and Civil Air Patrol frequency-capable, not some stupid $10 FRS radio) have helped rescue injured and lost people from mountains or rugged backcountry terrain, the GPS has pinpointed the location for other SAR members when necessary, and the cellphone sometimes even works.
It's not about leaving them at home. It's about knowing when it's appropriate to use them.
You may leave your toys at home when you're in the woods, that's fine -- when an active, prepared volunteer Search & Rescue team member happens by and you've fallen down and broken an ankle, you'll be happy we have ours with us.
I have no doubt that in the future this will happen, however if you look at the average age of the existing aircraft fleet, by the time I'm a very old man (or at least past the age-60 retirement rule for Part 141 air-carrier operations) only 10-20% of the fleet will have been retired. Another 10-20% new aircraft means that less than half the aircraft flying will even have a chance of being retrofitted.
I was taking this into account when I was discussing the issue -- my response was not only a knee-jerk "pilots should have control" response. Autopilots took 1/2 of the time (50 years) that aircraft have been flying to even be invented, and only in the last 1/3 of that time have they become ubiquitous in air-carrier operation -- meanwhile the majority of the non air-carrier fleet has no autopilot capability other than bizjets.
It's going to take a loooooong time to implement and like autopilots, very few aircraft owners will be able to afford it.
"Destroys" him (or her)? Ever watch "Engineering Disasters" on the History Channel?
The same engineering company that designed the structure that fell down and hurt people usually has a representative standing there explaining how they just had to "learn from their mistakes"... of course the people are still dead... and the company's still around. And the "team" isn't usually fired... that I've seen anyway.
(I know a few "Software engineers" -- I put that in quotes because there aren't any standards for software engineering and certainly it's not up to the level of quality of other engineering disciplines -- who could use a little "destruction" if this were true, since their poor programming has cost others millions of dollars and probably even ruined a few people's lives... and they're till programming.)
As an engineer AND a pilot, I want the guy who's butt's on the line (the guy in the aircraft) to have overall say in where the aircraft goes, and more importantly -- how.
Let's say the aircraft is operating in a non-standard way (already has a failure of some sort) and the automated system keeps the pilot from taking the most direct route (near or past a large building) to a safe landing. No automated system can ever have the big picture the pilot does. There'd better be an override. If there's an override a hijacker would certainly know about it, making the system utterly useless.
All engineers know the rule... "You can't fix a human problem with technology." People who hate others enough to steal aircraft and put them where they put others in danger isn't a technological problem and will never be solved with technology.
Just to be fair, there are bad pilots out there also, but the competition to fly "big iron" is high enough that the vast majority of those are weeded out before they ever get to fly an aircraft large enough to be much of a threat to structures or people, and the majority of aircraft that hit terrain are not air-carrier class aircraft. Yes, there are exceptions to that, but they're exceedingly rare and usually involve other failures (static port covered in Peru accident, controllability problems in Japan accident, etc.).
And finally, the cost of installing such a system in any aircraft pretty much makes the whole discussion moot, anyway. It's only cost-effective to design into a brand new aircraft, retrofitting existing aircraft isn't going to be something the airlines or anyone else wants to pay for.
Unless the "majority" panics, pushes it politically, and refuses to step aboard an aircraft without the technology (isn't going to happen) it's a dead technology before it even leaves the starting blocks.
The "engineering" side of me says "cool", but also very impractical. Definitely fun to think of how to implement it properly, but "not gonna happen". The pilot side of me says "I'll know where the circuit breaker is, and I don't care if it's safety-wired. It'll get pulled at the first sign it's doing something stupid so I can fly the aircraft and ensure passenger safety."
I wasn't trying to insinuate that there aren't good engineers out there, I was simply stating that there will always need to be a cockpit override for such a system and thus, the system would be useless. With the vast majority of the air-carrier fleet not even having Category III auto-land capability (due to costs) it's supremely unlikely that this company will be able to sell anyone on this technology anyway.
I wouldn't recommend anyone invest any money in it, that's for sure.
It's called "toll-saver" and I haven't seen an answering machine without it for ten years.
My GE Phone/Digital Answering-Machine/900 MHz cordless base (model: 26958GE1-A) is four years old and has it. There's a switch on the back that causes it to answer on the fourth ring if no messages and the second ring if there are messages in memory.
Generally agreed, but the engineer goes home at night if his code kills a pilot. The pilot has a lot more at stake and more motivation for a "successful outcome" than the engineer on the ground ever will, when it comes to the ultimate life-and-death scenarios.
That is the number one reason there will always be a living, breathing, thinking pilot in the cockpit of anything carrying humans or flying above densely populated areas.
That's why you run your own mailserver and you register for stuff like this with an address like "newyorktimescrap@domain.com" and alias it to your "registrations@domain.com" address.
Then you find out exactly who sold you out to a mailing list company, and you can flame the hell out of them via their fax machine, with a real "Dear CEO..." letter...
Yes, business faxes do get better results and only take a minimal amount of research to get the phone number and setting up your own e-mail to fax gateway so you're still just sending e-mail -- but they don't know that.;-)
Unless you're blocking port 25 outbound, you (and everyone else running open "oh the world is beautiful, share your bandwidth flower-child brothers and sisters!" access points have created just another way for spammers to inject crap into our inboxes.
Umm, I thought WPA just rotated standard WAP keys? If that's true, that's not "stronger encryption" that's just "changing encryption at the same strength".
Seriously... the home machine gets infected and then you connect it conveniently into the VPN router and over-the-firewall-and-through-the-woods-to-grandmo thers-house-we-go goes the virus...
VPN's are only as secure as the home user is vigilant. Never will be any better than that.
The 78's sound as good as the day they were recorded. It's just that the recording itself (the source) was pretty crappy-sounding back then.
But at least you get to hear the artist and not some computer-re-tuned voice from someone who sings off-key and has to be fixed digitally, like today...
Jazz off of old records is sublime stuff, complete with background crowd noises and real history in the making. Today's "light jazz" blows chunks and Kenny G. should be hung in a public location.
Digital remastering of the original recordings is great as long as the modern sound engineer doesn't decide to screw around with the original and "enhance" it. (Typical engineer, "enhance it 'till it's broke!")
Most of my experience has shown the amount of good tech support given is in direct relationship to either a) how much I'm paying for it, or b) how easy it is for me to drop their product and go to a competitor in the marketplace.
In other words, if you have them by the wallet, you have their attention. Most tech support organizations are ultimately motivated by the company's success/failure (i.e. when the company is struggling and they're working lots of long hours with no reward for it, or times are good and they're fully staffed and the company is paying well), and will go up and down in quality along with those waves.
Cisco seems to take overall customer satisfaction with tech support pretty seriously and ask the customer after the ticket is closed how happy they are with the answer. I assume they also base internal compensation and maybe even reviews on this data, because they're consistently very good for such a large organization scattered across the globe. But again, getting a Cisco front-line guy to ESCALATE anything if it's not a Network Down Level-1 ticket is virtually impossible, or if you don't have a high-$ support contract with them.
Tandy Color Computers 1, 2 and 3 and OS/9... those were the days. Also messed around with family TRS-80 Model III that a small business was being run on using VisiCalc.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, ELT's are gooooood.... Front Range Electronic Direction Finders.
DXpedition baby... oh yeah.
;-)
Take only pictures, leave only confused electrons.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of XML creators!
(Ungggh, I can't believe I just typed that... had to be done.)
Lot of good it did you, we're not reading articles about you camping. Oh wait, maybe that's not so bad. Who wants the press hanging around their campsite? :-)
Gee, that's funny -- my walkie-talkies (ham radio, FERN, and Civil Air Patrol frequency-capable, not some stupid $10 FRS radio) have helped rescue injured and lost people from mountains or rugged backcountry terrain, the GPS has pinpointed the location for other SAR members when necessary, and the cellphone sometimes even works.
It's not about leaving them at home. It's about knowing when it's appropriate to use them.
You may leave your toys at home when you're in the woods, that's fine -- when an active, prepared volunteer Search & Rescue team member happens by and you've fallen down and broken an ankle, you'll be happy we have ours with us.
Only if they brought bit-buckets. You catch snipes in bit-buckets.
Doh. I completely missed the ~ .
:-)
Of course even funnier is that someone modded me up. Good lord.
If the interface actually comes back up. :-)
Of course, if you screwed up the config... you're drivin'.
Been there, done that.
Don't use /tmp while editing large files on a Solaris box please. (It's RAM, silly.) Get out of the habit of using it in general.
/tmp could be set up to allow others to view your work-in-progress.
$HOME/tmp would be more appropriate in almost all cases anyway... perms on
Not true. Sol 8 and 9 do this on all the boxes I admin. It's not the software, it's the hardware.
You can also send a true BREAK from something like minicom (Ctrl-Z F) if you're on the serial console and it'll do it... it's still a feature.
And a BREAK is sometimes interpreted when you run the serial console at faster speeds and unplug from it. 9600 bps 8-N-1 recommended.
I have no doubt that in the future this will happen, however if you look at the average age of the existing aircraft fleet, by the time I'm a very old man (or at least past the age-60 retirement rule for Part 141 air-carrier operations) only 10-20% of the fleet will have been retired. Another 10-20% new aircraft means that less than half the aircraft flying will even have a chance of being retrofitted.
I was taking this into account when I was discussing the issue -- my response was not only a knee-jerk "pilots should have control" response. Autopilots took 1/2 of the time (50 years) that aircraft have been flying to even be invented, and only in the last 1/3 of that time have they become ubiquitous in air-carrier operation -- meanwhile the majority of the non air-carrier fleet has no autopilot capability other than bizjets.
It's going to take a loooooong time to implement and like autopilots, very few aircraft owners will be able to afford it.
"Destroys" him (or her)? Ever watch "Engineering Disasters" on the History Channel?
The same engineering company that designed the structure that fell down and hurt people usually has a representative standing there explaining how they just had to "learn from their mistakes"... of course the people are still dead... and the company's still around. And the "team" isn't usually fired... that I've seen anyway.
(I know a few "Software engineers" -- I put that in quotes because there aren't any standards for software engineering and certainly it's not up to the level of quality of other engineering disciplines -- who could use a little "destruction" if this were true, since their poor programming has cost others millions of dollars and probably even ruined a few people's lives... and they're till programming.)
As an engineer AND a pilot, I want the guy who's butt's on the line (the guy in the aircraft) to have overall say in where the aircraft goes, and more importantly -- how.
Let's say the aircraft is operating in a non-standard way (already has a failure of some sort) and the automated system keeps the pilot from taking the most direct route (near or past a large building) to a safe landing. No automated system can ever have the big picture the pilot does. There'd better be an override. If there's an override a hijacker would certainly know about it, making the system utterly useless.
All engineers know the rule... "You can't fix a human problem with technology." People who hate others enough to steal aircraft and put them where they put others in danger isn't a technological problem and will never be solved with technology.
Just to be fair, there are bad pilots out there also, but the competition to fly "big iron" is high enough that the vast majority of those are weeded out before they ever get to fly an aircraft large enough to be much of a threat to structures or people, and the majority of aircraft that hit terrain are not air-carrier class aircraft. Yes, there are exceptions to that, but they're exceedingly rare and usually involve other failures (static port covered in Peru accident, controllability problems in Japan accident, etc.).
And finally, the cost of installing such a system in any aircraft pretty much makes the whole discussion moot, anyway. It's only cost-effective to design into a brand new aircraft, retrofitting existing aircraft isn't going to be something the airlines or anyone else wants to pay for.
Unless the "majority" panics, pushes it politically, and refuses to step aboard an aircraft without the technology (isn't going to happen) it's a dead technology before it even leaves the starting blocks.
The "engineering" side of me says "cool", but also very impractical. Definitely fun to think of how to implement it properly, but "not gonna happen". The pilot side of me says "I'll know where the circuit breaker is, and I don't care if it's safety-wired. It'll get pulled at the first sign it's doing something stupid so I can fly the aircraft and ensure passenger safety."
I wasn't trying to insinuate that there aren't good engineers out there, I was simply stating that there will always need to be a cockpit override for such a system and thus, the system would be useless. With the vast majority of the air-carrier fleet not even having Category III auto-land capability (due to costs) it's supremely unlikely that this company will be able to sell anyone on this technology anyway.
I wouldn't recommend anyone invest any money in it, that's for sure.
It's called "toll-saver" and I haven't seen an answering machine without it for ten years.
My GE Phone/Digital Answering-Machine/900 MHz cordless base (model: 26958GE1-A) is four years old and has it. There's a switch on the back that causes it to answer on the fourth ring if no messages and the second ring if there are messages in memory.
Umm, the Via Eden 533's run just fine without a heatsink on the processor. 50 watts just isn't very much heat to dissipate.
Yeah, its slow...
Your generalization is incorrect.
Generally agreed, but the engineer goes home at night if his code kills a pilot. The pilot has a lot more at stake and more motivation for a "successful outcome" than the engineer on the ground ever will, when it comes to the ultimate life-and-death scenarios.
That is the number one reason there will always be a living, breathing, thinking pilot in the cockpit of anything carrying humans or flying above densely populated areas.
I haven't had an answering machine in years that WOULDN'T do both those features. Read the manual.
That's why you run your own mailserver and you register for stuff like this with an address like "newyorktimescrap@domain.com" and alias it to your "registrations@domain.com" address.
;-)
Then you find out exactly who sold you out to a mailing list company, and you can flame the hell out of them via their fax machine, with a real "Dear CEO..." letter...
Yes, business faxes do get better results and only take a minimal amount of research to get the phone number and setting up your own e-mail to fax gateway so you're still just sending e-mail -- but they don't know that.
Unless you're blocking port 25 outbound, you (and everyone else running open "oh the world is beautiful, share your bandwidth flower-child brothers and sisters!" access points have created just another way for spammers to inject crap into our inboxes.
Umm, I thought WPA just rotated standard WAP keys? If that's true, that's not "stronger encryption" that's just "changing encryption at the same strength".
One word: Virii
o thers-house-we-go goes the virus...
Seriously... the home machine gets infected and then you connect it conveniently into the VPN router and over-the-firewall-and-through-the-woods-to-grandm
VPN's are only as secure as the home user is vigilant. Never will be any better than that.
Get her Vonage service and a red Bat Phone. Tell her to call you on the Bat Phone.
Much more fun than mucking around with software on the computers.
The 78's sound as good as the day they were recorded. It's just that the recording itself (the source) was pretty crappy-sounding back then.
But at least you get to hear the artist and not some computer-re-tuned voice from someone who sings off-key and has to be fixed digitally, like today...
Jazz off of old records is sublime stuff, complete with background crowd noises and real history in the making. Today's "light jazz" blows chunks and Kenny G. should be hung in a public location.
Digital remastering of the original recordings is great as long as the modern sound engineer doesn't decide to screw around with the original and "enhance" it. (Typical engineer, "enhance it 'till it's broke!")
Most of my experience has shown the amount of good tech support given is in direct relationship to either a) how much I'm paying for it, or b) how easy it is for me to drop their product and go to a competitor in the marketplace.
In other words, if you have them by the wallet, you have their attention. Most tech support organizations are ultimately motivated by the company's success/failure (i.e. when the company is struggling and they're working lots of long hours with no reward for it, or times are good and they're fully staffed and the company is paying well), and will go up and down in quality along with those waves.
Cisco seems to take overall customer satisfaction with tech support pretty seriously and ask the customer after the ticket is closed how happy they are with the answer. I assume they also base internal compensation and maybe even reviews on this data, because they're consistently very good for such a large organization scattered across the globe. But again, getting a Cisco front-line guy to ESCALATE anything if it's not a Network Down Level-1 ticket is virtually impossible, or if you don't have a high-$ support contract with them.
one word: tar
Will 50881 work for ya? Picky picky.
:-)
;-)
Tandy Color Computers 1, 2 and 3 and OS/9... those were the days. Also messed around with family TRS-80 Model III that a small business was being run on using VisiCalc.
Happy now?