We live in a police state. We need to show id to travel or buy a house. The government now has the right to spy on us. We are no longer tax payers or citizens, just potential terrorists.
I work with a guy who once lived in Russia during the cold war. He says that this reminds him of home.
Just like Hitler or Stalin, the administration just wants to protect us from the great outside evil.
We are an Akamai customer. All of our content cached through Akamai was offline for a little over an hour as measured by keynote, a site testing tool.
I spoke with Akamai support. They indicated that it was a far reaching problem, but I have not heard the reason yet.
The customer login to the admin portal was down as well. It was almost like someone dump the customer account database.
Akamai has a QOS commitment of 100% uptime based on the idea that not all of the 1,000's of servers could go down at the same time. But... There you go.
We don't have to implement a hokey work around to get around the letter of the ruling.
Anyone running Flash, Real Media Player or Windows Media Player would have had to update every page with these plug ins.
Not bad if you have a handful, but any large site operator would need to spend a LOT of time to find/update/test each one... A huge amount of unproductive effort.
Check out the new glass cockpit in new Cessina airplanes: http://www.garmin.com/products/g1000/
You can buy these now. Several companies make glass cockpits for small airplanes, both certified and experimental. The Attitude and Heading Reference Systems for these use solid state gyros and are roughly as accurate as the laser gyros used in big jets, but much less expensive. They are at least as reliable as the mechanical gyros they replace.
Liability insurance costs have indeed driven up the cost of a new airplane. For many years, the big makers stopped building and selling single engine airplanes. They started again after a law was passed to limit their liability to 18 years.
Flying a small plane today is not as safe as driving. But, technology can help. Today, airbus jets use fly by wire technology for "envelope protection". The flight control system will not let the jet stall or roll inverted. There is nothing to prevent the same technology from helping small planes... but not soon. It will take time.
Even Engines are slowly getting better. New airplanes are fuel injected, just like your car. FADEC engines are slowly becoming available.
As for afordable, a good, if older airplanes can be purchased for under $50k. It is not cheap, but you do not need to be rich. Many pilots join clubs or share a airplane.
Change is slow, but it is happening. It may be a long time before flying is as dependable and cheap as driving, if ever. Most pilots treat it as a hobby rather than a dependable way to travel.
In the meantime. It is still a lot of fun!
Personal flying is fun and getting better
on
The Future of Flight
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Change takes a long time for airplanes. A small airplane may last more than 30 years and fly just as fast and as far as a new airplane.
Wings and engines have not changed much in 50 years.
But... New electronics are finding their way into small planes that anyone can learn to fly.
Now GPS makes it hard to get lost. New electronic flight displays are replacing 50 year old "steam gauge" instruments.
Sooner or later, someone will perfect cheap and reliable fly by wire controls that will make small aircraft much simpler to fly and reduce training time and improve safety.
Today, personal flying is a fun way to travel. Just yesterday was a beautiful, sunny day. I flew up to New Hampshire just to enjoy the view.
On warm days, my wife likes to fly with me down to Martha's Vineyard, a small island off the coast of Massachusetts where we can land on a grass strip 50 feet from the beach. When the sun goes down, we just get back in the plane and fly home.
Flying is a very old dream. Anyone can learn to fly, but be warned, once you start, it is very addictive! Flying is not just a way to get from here to there. It is a lot of fun all by itself.
At least two other flying cars have been sold commercially over the years. They never caught on. They generaly make both poor airplanes and poor cars.
In this case, they will have two engines and need to conform to two different sets of regulations. Also, the wing will need to retract for driving mode, but still be strong in flight. Also, they need to fly with all of the extra weight needed for land driving like big wheels and heavy drivetrain.
It will suck in the air and suck on the ground.
You will still need a Pilots certificate to fly it. They are not easy to get. I spent over a year to get mine.
There are a lot of good airplane makers with actual products that perform very well that have a hard time keeping the doors open.
The Moller skycar is trying to do something very different. They are trying to build a airplane that uses computer controlled fans to take off and land vertically, then use the body as a airfoil for high speed flight. There is no need for a runway or a airport.
It would be very cool if they could do it. But, dont hold your breath. Moller has been trying to build it for several decades and has burned a lot of money.
They are trying to build new engines, fly by wire control system and a new lift configuration. Big project. There might not be any one thing that is a show stopper, but getting there will take a lot of investment.
They provide great service. Very easy to set up and no fuss. They filter all of our mail. Very few false positives. It's cheap too.
We route all of our mail to spamcop and they tag what they think is spam and send it back to us. It is easy on our side to move the tagged mail into a "Bulk mail" folder.
They developed a very fair way to block spammers IP addresses based on compaints and blind email accounts. The scores "age", so if spam stops coming from a IP address, it is taken off the list.
They also use SpamAssassin for content filtering. Between IP and content filtering, they get most of the spam.
They are a small outfit and they have had several serious denial of service attacks targeted at them. They would not be attacked if they where not effective. I dont think that they charge enough given the value of the service they provide.
If you have a spam problem, you could do a lot worse.
AOPA (Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association)lobbies to keep airports open and keep down the cost of flying.
Flying is a lot of fun. If you like flight simulators, you can try the real thing for about $50 at almost any small airport.
Fly by wire could open the skys
on
The End of Solotrek
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
New planes built today have not changed much in 50 years. It takes a long time to learn how to fly a plane today. If flight systems where designed from scratch today using the same usibility techniques that are used to design consumer products, flying would be much more accessable to many more people than today.
I am a student pilot and I know the time and commitment that it takes to learn how to fly.
The "powered lift" products like this and the mollar sky car use computer control to vastly simplify flying. Controls dont really need to be much more complex than "go up, go down, turn left, turn right" if the computer controls the power as well as control surfaces.
Today small aircrafts are just now starting to adopt "FADEC" to reduce three knobs on the dashboard just to control power, to only one. Big deal. FADEC systems are similar to the engine computer that your 10 year old car has.
Due to the threat of product liability lawsuits, it is very hard to get investment dollars for any type of new aircraft or flight critical system, let alone something as radical as this.
In Aviation, change happens slowly, oh so slowly. Personal VTOL will happen, but maybe not during my lifetime.
As a student pilot I have found that most of the technology used in aircraft was developed more than 20 years ago and is VERY slow to change.
The non-military GPS signals used by aircraft for navigation are much weaker than the military versions that are designed to be jam resistant. They are little more than noise.
There is talk about shutting down the old VOR based network of radio navigation since most pilots would rather use GPS. However, concerns about possible jamming of GPS signals has delayed the VOR phase out.
Collision avoidance systems used in large comercial aircraft are based on transponder signals used by air traffic control, which are based on old WWII friend or foe systems. In order to scale up to high traffic levels, these systems now use a lot of signal processing that is noise senstive. Air traffic control sometimes see's "Ghost" aircraft that are artifacts of noise.
So, eletronic navigation and traffic detection used in aircraft, large and small are vulnerable to incrased electronic noise. It is not unreasable that new uses of spectrium must ensure compatibility with existing systems.
These aircraft systems will not change anytime soon. The industry is very slow to change due to the risk of loss of life and the lawsuits that would follow.
Our co-location provider, AboveNet was bought by MetroMedia and then when Chapter 11.
The sales office stoped responding to calls, we never received any communication from MetroMedia of what would happen to our service.
To protect ourselves, we had to build a mirror of all of our critical services with another ISP.
We plan to leave AboveNet as soon as our contract runs out. Their service sucked even before they went under. Bad service and attitudes top to bottom. I cant count how many times their network went offline.
Between our two mirror sites, we are now able to survive shutdown of either datacenter with no impact on users.
The thing is that all of the ISP pitched value added services like managed VPN and hosting because it was easy to do and had great profit.
They where counting on revenue from these services to make up for lost revenue for pure co-location and bandwidth as capacity was overbuilt.
They never had many takers.
Why pay a few thousand a month for somthing that you can set up in a few hours and have better control over? The only way to justify it would be to get savings by downsizing. Most managers do everything they can to avoid downsizing.
How does Google solve the global load balancing problem? Foundry Networks claims that you use their ServerIron products. Is it true?
Do you do anything special to map different parts of the network to server farms? How do you collect performance metrics while avoiding active probe compaints?
This kind of a boondoggle is a sales guy dream. It will take years to build and prove to be unable to perform the task. By that time, the guy who sold it will be long gone, after he pockets his commision.
Systems that build a big pile of data and "try to find patterns" sound good, but never seem to work in real life.
They always seem to degrade into a very simple rule of thumb like "If you paid late before, you might pay late again." Duh.
So is the new rule "If you hijacked a plane before, you might hijack another one?" You dont need to track who I live with/sleep with to keep a list of people that hijack planes.
These systems that "find subtle patterns" usally find data artifacts that have little or no predictive power with lots of false positives.
In the mean time, it will be more useful for divorce lawyers if they can get their hands on the data. Ever want to hide from an ex wife? Never fly on a plane. Ever.
OOP is just another tool. It is a tool that takes some time to master, but can greatly simplify complex software projects.
For a very simple program such as a numeric program that executes a tight loop, there is probably not much benifit. It might be more important to be compatible with some library that meets your needs. If the library was not designed with OOP in mind or was implemented in a languge that does not have strong support for OOP, then it may be more trouble than it is worth.
If the program is more complex, then if you take the time to master OOP, you might find the program is simpler and more logical. But, watch out for the trap of trying to go overboard on OPP. Many programers that are new to OOP get tangled up in trying to do it the "right" way and wind up with a program that is very complicated and slow, defeating the point.
I like to to use OOP tools like C++ and Java because I have used them so long, it is simpler for me. But, I could acomplish the same thing using K&R C.
Either way, the job gets done. Sometimes it just comes down to what you prefer.
Slashdot Mirror
I work with a guy who once lived in Russia during the cold war. He says that this reminds him of home.
Just like Hitler or Stalin, the administration just wants to protect us from the great outside evil.
I spoke with Akamai support. They indicated that it was a far reaching problem, but I have not heard the reason yet.
The customer login to the admin portal was down as well. It was almost like someone dump the customer account database.
Akamai has a QOS commitment of 100% uptime based on the idea that not all of the 1,000's of servers could go down at the same time. But... There you go.
We don't have to implement a hokey work around to get around the letter of the ruling. Anyone running Flash, Real Media Player or Windows Media Player would have had to update every page with these plug ins. Not bad if you have a handful, but any large site operator would need to spend a LOT of time to find/update/test each one... A huge amount of unproductive effort.
After living here six years, I still don't know what it means.
You can buy these now. Several companies make glass cockpits for small airplanes, both certified and experimental. The Attitude and Heading Reference Systems for these use solid state gyros and are roughly as accurate as the laser gyros used in big jets, but much less expensive. They are at least as reliable as the mechanical gyros they replace.
Liability insurance costs have indeed driven up the cost of a new airplane. For many years, the big makers stopped building and selling single engine airplanes. They started again after a law was passed to limit their liability to 18 years.
Flying a small plane today is not as safe as driving. But, technology can help. Today, airbus jets use fly by wire technology for "envelope protection". The flight control system will not let the jet stall or roll inverted. There is nothing to prevent the same technology from helping small planes... but not soon. It will take time.
Even Engines are slowly getting better. New airplanes are fuel injected, just like your car. FADEC engines are slowly becoming available.
As for afordable, a good, if older airplanes can be purchased for under $50k. It is not cheap, but you do not need to be rich. Many pilots join clubs or share a airplane.
Change is slow, but it is happening. It may be a long time before flying is as dependable and cheap as driving, if ever. Most pilots treat it as a hobby rather than a dependable way to travel.
In the meantime. It is still a lot of fun!
Wings and engines have not changed much in 50 years.
But... New electronics are finding their way into small planes that anyone can learn to fly.
Now GPS makes it hard to get lost. New electronic flight displays are replacing 50 year old "steam gauge" instruments.
Sooner or later, someone will perfect cheap and reliable fly by wire controls that will make small aircraft much simpler to fly and reduce training time and improve safety.
Today, personal flying is a fun way to travel. Just yesterday was a beautiful, sunny day. I flew up to New Hampshire just to enjoy the view.
On warm days, my wife likes to fly with me down to Martha's Vineyard, a small island off the coast of Massachusetts where we can land on a grass strip 50 feet from the beach. When the sun goes down, we just get back in the plane and fly home.
Flying is a very old dream. Anyone can learn to fly, but be warned, once you start, it is very addictive! Flying is not just a way to get from here to there. It is a lot of fun all by itself.
In this case, they will have two engines and need to conform to two different sets of regulations. Also, the wing will need to retract for driving mode, but still be strong in flight. Also, they need to fly with all of the extra weight needed for land driving like big wheels and heavy drivetrain.
It will suck in the air and suck on the ground.
You will still need a Pilots certificate to fly it. They are not easy to get. I spent over a year to get mine.
There are a lot of good airplane makers with actual products that perform very well that have a hard time keeping the doors open.
The Moller skycar is trying to do something very different. They are trying to build a airplane that uses computer controlled fans to take off and land vertically, then use the body as a airfoil for high speed flight. There is no need for a runway or a airport.
It would be very cool if they could do it. But, dont hold your breath. Moller has been trying to build it for several decades and has burned a lot of money.
They are trying to build new engines, fly by wire control system and a new lift configuration. Big project. There might not be any one thing that is a show stopper, but getting there will take a lot of investment.
They provide great service. Very easy to set up and no fuss. They filter all of our mail. Very few false positives. It's cheap too. We route all of our mail to spamcop and they tag what they think is spam and send it back to us. It is easy on our side to move the tagged mail into a "Bulk mail" folder. They developed a very fair way to block spammers IP addresses based on compaints and blind email accounts. The scores "age", so if spam stops coming from a IP address, it is taken off the list. They also use SpamAssassin for content filtering. Between IP and content filtering, they get most of the spam. They are a small outfit and they have had several serious denial of service attacks targeted at them. They would not be attacked if they where not effective. I dont think that they charge enough given the value of the service they provide. If you have a spam problem, you could do a lot worse.
http://www.aopa.org
AOPA (Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association)lobbies to keep airports open and keep down the cost of flying.
Flying is a lot of fun. If you like flight simulators, you can try the real thing for about $50 at almost any small airport.
I am a student pilot and I know the time and commitment that it takes to learn how to fly.
The "powered lift" products like this and the mollar sky car use computer control to vastly simplify flying. Controls dont really need to be much more complex than "go up, go down, turn left, turn right" if the computer controls the power as well as control surfaces.
Today small aircrafts are just now starting to adopt "FADEC" to reduce three knobs on the dashboard just to control power, to only one. Big deal. FADEC systems are similar to the engine computer that your 10 year old car has.
Due to the threat of product liability lawsuits, it is very hard to get investment dollars for any type of new aircraft or flight critical system, let alone something as radical as this.
In Aviation, change happens slowly, oh so slowly. Personal VTOL will happen, but maybe not during my lifetime.
As a student pilot I have found that most of the technology used in aircraft was developed more than 20 years ago and is VERY slow to change.
The non-military GPS signals used by aircraft for navigation are much weaker than the military versions that are designed to be jam resistant. They are little more than noise.
There is talk about shutting down the old VOR based network of radio navigation since most pilots would rather use GPS. However, concerns about possible jamming of GPS signals has delayed the VOR phase out.
Collision avoidance systems used in large comercial aircraft are based on transponder signals used by air traffic control, which are based on old WWII friend or foe systems. In order to scale up to high traffic levels, these systems now use a lot of signal processing that is noise senstive. Air traffic control sometimes see's "Ghost" aircraft that are artifacts of noise.
So, eletronic navigation and traffic detection used in aircraft, large and small are vulnerable to incrased electronic noise. It is not unreasable that new uses of spectrium must ensure compatibility with existing systems.
These aircraft systems will not change anytime soon. The industry is very slow to change due to the risk of loss of life and the lawsuits that would follow.
Our co-location provider, AboveNet was bought by MetroMedia and then when Chapter 11. The sales office stoped responding to calls, we never received any communication from MetroMedia of what would happen to our service. To protect ourselves, we had to build a mirror of all of our critical services with another ISP. We plan to leave AboveNet as soon as our contract runs out. Their service sucked even before they went under. Bad service and attitudes top to bottom. I cant count how many times their network went offline. Between our two mirror sites, we are now able to survive shutdown of either datacenter with no impact on users.
The thing is that all of the ISP pitched value added services like managed VPN and hosting because it was easy to do and had great profit. They where counting on revenue from these services to make up for lost revenue for pure co-location and bandwidth as capacity was overbuilt. They never had many takers. Why pay a few thousand a month for somthing that you can set up in a few hours and have better control over? The only way to justify it would be to get savings by downsizing. Most managers do everything they can to avoid downsizing.
How does Google solve the global load balancing problem? Foundry Networks claims that you use their ServerIron products. Is it true?
Do you do anything special to map different parts of the network to server farms? How do you collect performance metrics while avoiding active probe compaints?
This kind of a boondoggle is a sales guy dream. It will take years to build and prove to be unable to perform the task. By that time, the guy who sold it will be long gone, after he pockets his commision.
Systems that build a big pile of data and "try to find patterns" sound good, but never seem to work in real life.
They always seem to degrade into a very simple rule of thumb like "If you paid late before, you might pay late again." Duh.
So is the new rule "If you hijacked a plane before, you might hijack another one?" You dont need to track who I live with/sleep with to keep a list of people that hijack planes.
These systems that "find subtle patterns" usally find data artifacts that have little or no predictive power with lots of false positives.
In the mean time, it will be more useful for divorce lawyers if they can get their hands on the data. Ever want to hide from an ex wife? Never fly on a plane. Ever.
OOP is just another tool. It is a tool that takes some time to master, but can greatly simplify complex software projects.
For a very simple program such as a numeric program that executes a tight loop, there is probably not much benifit. It might be more important to be compatible with some library that meets your needs. If the library was not designed with OOP in mind or was implemented in a languge that does not have strong support for OOP, then it may be more trouble than it is worth.
If the program is more complex, then if you take the time to master OOP, you might find the program is simpler and more logical. But, watch out for the trap of trying to go overboard on OPP. Many programers that are new to OOP get tangled up in trying to do it the "right" way and wind up with a program that is very complicated and slow, defeating the point.
I like to to use OOP tools like C++ and Java because I have used them so long, it is simpler for me. But, I could acomplish the same thing using K&R C.
Either way, the job gets done. Sometimes it just comes down to what you prefer.