Both failures and successes so easily. Everyone wants to think that their idea was first and the best.
For a failure, Sprint tried long range microwave broadband several years ago. They were going to add it to their ION service offering, but when ION got killed, so did the microwave broadband project. Sprint isn't known for their quality of support either. Having them go back into this business is a scary prospect.
Who says municipal wifi failed? A couple big cities that do not make up a huge percentage of land area or population of the US failed at it, and that makes the news. What doesn't make the news are the successes of nonprofit municipal partnerships such as Lawrence Freenet. I'm a happy subscriber to my municipal wifi service, and I have excellent coverage everywhere in a city of 100,000 people. Municipal wifi has not failed, but many have failed to manage it.
Yep, I am running WSUS on a Server 2003 box with a bunch of XP workstations in a small company. I push out all Critical Updates and Security Updates for Windows and Office automatically. Still running version 7.0.6000.374 of wuapi.dll here, and no problems.
I am a major user of software from UGS Corp (now owned by Siemens), in particular, I use their NX CAD/CAM/CAE software, which is heavily used in large scale engineering and manufacturing firms (General Motors is their biggest client I believe). Last year UGS released a Linux port of the NX software, and offered support. Looking at the pricing, both the Linux media kit and Linux support are noticeably cheaper than the Windows version of the software and support. I have used the support and never had a problem with the support techs, in fact, they've been great.
My bad, sorry, wasn't paying attention...not enough coffee.:)
Still, you have the problem of weight. The payload isn't light, and the aircraft requires a 135hp powerplant to push it along with the payload for the desired flight time. The Qinetiq airplane you refer to is only 30kg, the engine alone for the Meridian is an order of magnitude heavier than that. It is a much larger airplane. Just like you can't use a Yugo to tow a 28 ft motorboat, you can't use a small solar powered airplane to carry the sensor payload for CReSIS.
About points 2 and 3, you are quite mistaken sir. Qinetiq has nothing to do with this aircraft. The Meridian was designed, developed, and will be manufactured completely by the University of Kansas in conjunction with the NSF. It is not milspec design either. It was designed by students.
You would need an electric motor producing 135hp at the same rpm as the Thielert Centurion.
You would also need solar panels capable of delivering sufficient power to run that motor, which would be HUGE.
Given the required airspeed, altitude, and payload, it is impossible to use a current aircraft for this mission. The biggest reason is the radar (payload). Due to its sensitivity, you can't use an aluminum airplane, which is what the P3 is. Meridian has carbon fiber composite structure and skin. Also, the cruise airspeed for taking data is significantly lower than the cruise speed of a P3. The P3 has four big turboprop engines whereas the Meridian is a piston single with a Diesel cycle engine. The specific fuel consumption of the engine is dramatically less than a P3's engine at the same altitude. Most importantly however, is crew. If you're flying a P3 over Antarctica, you need a crew for that airplane. If there is an emergency and the aircraft crashes or lands in a remote area, the lives of the crew are in great jeopardy. The Meridian is unmanned, so if you lose an aircraft, you don't lose a crew.
Right now Meridian's mission is clear, and it has been developed to successfully accomplish the goals set in the mission.
I've actually done some work (unofficially) with CReSIS on their UAV, before the Meridian design. I pushed for a diesel piston engine for the powerplant back in the day, and now the first Thielert engine is sitting in KU's engine test facility today.
The fuselage plugs arrived here a few weeks ago, and they look great. I believe they were made by Scaled Composites. Dr. Hale has done a fantastic job leading the aerospace side of this project. This aircraft design and development is being done by KU. Design verification is even done with software from Lawrence based DARcorporation, a spinoff of the University of Kansas with strong ties to their Aerospace Engineering department. And the first two aircraft will be manufactured at KU. Not to neglect anyone, the EECS department's team has spent many years working on the radar (I knew guys six years ago working on ground penetrating radar here) and its prospects are looking good. This is definitely a project that KU and Lawrence should be proud of.
A lot of time and effort from bright students and researchers has gone into the CReSIS project, its good to see that it has been noticed.
Does nobody here deal with licensing of old UNIX operating systems? Does nobody here have to deal with _real_ engineering, modeling, and simulation software? Autodesk products are child's play compared to things like Fluent, Patran, Nastran, UG/NX, Teamcenter, and CATIA. Read some of the licenses for products like these.
I am in charge of license control for an engineering program used (legally) in over 45 countries by companies and universities. We use a dongle for licensing with heavy encryption on the key and in the program itself. We sell floating (network) licenses and node-locked licenses (software only runs on the computer that has the dongle in it). If you don't want your software any more, you can give it to someone else (with the dongle) but they will have to request and purchase maintenance and support when then dongle expires.
Older versions of our software used software license control which was easily cracked. Audacious "software wants to be free" zealots actually will call our support line requesting help, freely giving us their name, phone number, and email address, and then when we look them up and inform them that they are not a customer and thus not entitled to support, they get defensive and upset.
That would be a great solution if it weren't for the oft overlooked fact that over 90% of America is rural. How are those of us in "flyover states" going to get the time?
As a Chicagoan (born and raised) I am deeply disappointed. Comcast rapes its customers there for mediocre (at best) service, and they are the biggest game in town.
I don't live there any more, I live far, far away in a smaller city in Kansas. We have our own problems, just like any other city, but with the cooperative efforts of our city commission and a non-profit organization, we figured out how to make a successful, inexpensive, functional, municipal wireless ISP using a mesh network that covers the entire city.
Already done where I live. City of 75,000 people, plus a university with 30,000 students. 600 mesh node radios across the city. They are growing by the day and the local cable company isn't exactly thrilled.
My TALON/SWORDS robot that I had for research had (as standard equipment) six cameras, including an IR camera; four of which could have their feeds displayed simultaneously on the operator control unit, and it was armored with kevlar secured by velcro. These are extremely robust robots. Of course a couple well placed.50s will disable damn near anything, including a semi truck, but the robot would be resistant to the majority of gunfire it would encounter. They can additionally be armed with grenade launchers and.50 rifles. These robots are also capable of righting themselves easily if they are flipped. Once you get the hang of it, righting it only takes about 10 seconds. The only point of your six that is possible is #6, althought the command/control and audio/video feeds operated on different, weird frequencies that are not in the public ISM band. However, I believe your point is moot as a squad of soliders in battle could have their radios jammed by a guy in a van and they would not be able to call for support if they were attacked.
Slashdot Mirror
Number of Special Agents on the Cyber Crimes Task Force at the Kansas City field office: Five.
I know three of them. They're good, and they have a good conviction rate, but still, only five? I don't know how they do it.
For a failure, Sprint tried long range microwave broadband several years ago. They were going to add it to their ION service offering, but when ION got killed, so did the microwave broadband project. Sprint isn't known for their quality of support either. Having them go back into this business is a scary prospect.
Who says municipal wifi failed? A couple big cities that do not make up a huge percentage of land area or population of the US failed at it, and that makes the news. What doesn't make the news are the successes of nonprofit municipal partnerships such as Lawrence Freenet. I'm a happy subscriber to my municipal wifi service, and I have excellent coverage everywhere in a city of 100,000 people. Municipal wifi has not failed, but many have failed to manage it.
Yep, I am running WSUS on a Server 2003 box with a bunch of XP workstations in a small company. I push out all Critical Updates and Security Updates for Windows and Office automatically. Still running version 7.0.6000.374 of wuapi.dll here, and no problems.
I am a major user of software from UGS Corp (now owned by Siemens), in particular, I use their NX CAD/CAM/CAE software, which is heavily used in large scale engineering and manufacturing firms (General Motors is their biggest client I believe). Last year UGS released a Linux port of the NX software, and offered support. Looking at the pricing, both the Linux media kit and Linux support are noticeably cheaper than the Windows version of the software and support. I have used the support and never had a problem with the support techs, in fact, they've been great.
My bad, sorry, wasn't paying attention...not enough coffee. :)
Still, you have the problem of weight. The payload isn't light, and the aircraft requires a 135hp powerplant to push it along with the payload for the desired flight time. The Qinetiq airplane you refer to is only 30kg, the engine alone for the Meridian is an order of magnitude heavier than that. It is a much larger airplane. Just like you can't use a Yugo to tow a 28 ft motorboat, you can't use a small solar powered airplane to carry the sensor payload for CReSIS.
"Using Outlook as a primary means to communicate makes me pine" I use pine for email too!
You are absolutely correct about point 1.
About points 2 and 3, you are quite mistaken sir. Qinetiq has nothing to do with this aircraft. The Meridian was designed, developed, and will be manufactured completely by the University of Kansas in conjunction with the NSF. It is not milspec design either. It was designed by students.
You would need an electric motor producing 135hp at the same rpm as the Thielert Centurion. You would also need solar panels capable of delivering sufficient power to run that motor, which would be HUGE.
Given the required airspeed, altitude, and payload, it is impossible to use a current aircraft for this mission. The biggest reason is the radar (payload). Due to its sensitivity, you can't use an aluminum airplane, which is what the P3 is. Meridian has carbon fiber composite structure and skin. Also, the cruise airspeed for taking data is significantly lower than the cruise speed of a P3. The P3 has four big turboprop engines whereas the Meridian is a piston single with a Diesel cycle engine. The specific fuel consumption of the engine is dramatically less than a P3's engine at the same altitude. Most importantly however, is crew. If you're flying a P3 over Antarctica, you need a crew for that airplane. If there is an emergency and the aircraft crashes or lands in a remote area, the lives of the crew are in great jeopardy. The Meridian is unmanned, so if you lose an aircraft, you don't lose a crew.
Right now Meridian's mission is clear, and it has been developed to successfully accomplish the goals set in the mission.
The fuselage plugs arrived here a few weeks ago, and they look great. I believe they were made by Scaled Composites. Dr. Hale has done a fantastic job leading the aerospace side of this project. This aircraft design and development is being done by KU. Design verification is even done with software from Lawrence based DARcorporation, a spinoff of the University of Kansas with strong ties to their Aerospace Engineering department. And the first two aircraft will be manufactured at KU. Not to neglect anyone, the EECS department's team has spent many years working on the radar (I knew guys six years ago working on ground penetrating radar here) and its prospects are looking good. This is definitely a project that KU and Lawrence should be proud of.
A lot of time and effort from bright students and researchers has gone into the CReSIS project, its good to see that it has been noticed.
Does nobody here deal with licensing of old UNIX operating systems? Does nobody here have to deal with _real_ engineering, modeling, and simulation software? Autodesk products are child's play compared to things like Fluent, Patran, Nastran, UG/NX, Teamcenter, and CATIA. Read some of the licenses for products like these.
I am in charge of license control for an engineering program used (legally) in over 45 countries by companies and universities. We use a dongle for licensing with heavy encryption on the key and in the program itself. We sell floating (network) licenses and node-locked licenses (software only runs on the computer that has the dongle in it). If you don't want your software any more, you can give it to someone else (with the dongle) but they will have to request and purchase maintenance and support when then dongle expires.
Older versions of our software used software license control which was easily cracked. Audacious "software wants to be free" zealots actually will call our support line requesting help, freely giving us their name, phone number, and email address, and then when we look them up and inform them that they are not a customer and thus not entitled to support, they get defensive and upset.
Damn kids, get off my lawn.
im in ur bank parkin lot sniffin ur account numbers
What do you set the watch to?
That would be a great solution if it weren't for the oft overlooked fact that over 90% of America is rural. How are those of us in "flyover states" going to get the time?
I don't live there any more, I live far, far away in a smaller city in Kansas. We have our own problems, just like any other city, but with the cooperative efforts of our city commission and a non-profit organization, we figured out how to make a successful, inexpensive, functional, municipal wireless ISP using a mesh network that covers the entire city.
Why can't anyone else?
im in ur datacenter breakin ur racks
im in ur power plant retractin ur control rods
Already done where I live. City of 75,000 people, plus a university with 30,000 students. 600 mesh node radios across the city. They are growing by the day and the local cable company isn't exactly thrilled.
"Severely old news" to me is more like "Dewey defeats Truman."
Every time you use "tho" in place of the actual word "though," God kills a kitten.
In his defense, the author is a perl guru, and has written at least one book on the language and several articles.
Its an article on his blog. His resume is available there as well, and not hard to find. Frank is exceptionally well qualified to write this article.
My TALON/SWORDS robot that I had for research had (as standard equipment) six cameras, including an IR camera; four of which could have their feeds displayed simultaneously on the operator control unit, and it was armored with kevlar secured by velcro. These are extremely robust robots. Of course a couple well placed .50s will disable damn near anything, including a semi truck, but the robot would be resistant to the majority of gunfire it would encounter. They can additionally be armed with grenade launchers and .50 rifles. These robots are also capable of righting themselves easily if they are flipped. Once you get the hang of it, righting it only takes about 10 seconds. The only point of your six that is possible is #6, althought the command/control and audio/video feeds operated on different, weird frequencies that are not in the public ISM band. However, I believe your point is moot as a squad of soliders in battle could have their radios jammed by a guy in a van and they would not be able to call for support if they were attacked.
You can buy them from Foster-Miller. Its not that hard. I had a civilian model for a while for research.
Both!
I have an MS Trackball Explorer, but also a Spaceball 4000 FLX to help out with UG.