The Arduino Tre looks interesting, but it basically is an Arduino Uno bolted on top of a Raspberry Pi, while the Intel Galileo is a Raspberry Pi (sans HDMI) emulating an Arduino Uno.
I think neither will be much of a success because they will be too expensive due to the cruft they carry around to ensure a compatibility that is IMHO not needed.
While I like the idea of having an Arduino compatible board running Linux to do some more advanced projects, I don't understand what drove Intel to force this board to be Arduino compatible. The Quark processor is not designed for this sort of stuff as it has neither a sufficient number of GPIO pins nor any ADCs. It sure has a lot of interfaces (SPI, I2C, PCI-E, SD-Card, Serial etc.), but it lacks the things that are useful for a hacker project.
So they had to include a separate GPIO extender chip (over a slow I2C interconnect) as well as an separate ADC. The Quark SoC has some 15 GPIO Pins, the extender another 40. But of those 55 Pins only 20 GPIO pins are actually available on the Arduino shield pins -- the rest is used for all the Muxes to switch pins between the ADC, the GPIO Extender and the Quark SoC to emulate the flexibility of the Arduino AVR processor.
While I haven't looked at the actual PCB schematic, I think the board layout is also strange. The ADC is on the opposite side from the analog input pins, meaning that all analog signals have to travel a long distance in the vicinity of some high speed digital signals. And the GPIO Extender Chip is on the opposite corner from all the digital output pins.
This, together with the BGA devices (SoC, RAM), seem to indicate that this is at least an 6 layer board which will make it hard to clone this design -- something that IMHO has contributed to the success of the Arduino. The Schematic for this board has 27 pages compared to the single page of the Arduino Uno
It seems that this Board is designed more as a competitor to the Raspberry Pi than to the Arduino, both in price and in features.The Arduino compatibility is just some marketing thing which makes the board overly complex and more expensive than it needs to be.
But hey, it sure must be fun to employ a few million transistors and a full blown operating system to run the Arduino Blink demo:-)
Just make sure you hook up your console with an Ethernet cable - I got a lot of stuttering on fast-paced video over the wireless.
Unfortunately the PS3 network stack has been broken for years.
Due to constantly dropping the connection and retransmitting everything multiple times, the PS3 needs about 5x - 10x more bandwidth than the actual video stream has. So you'll need a 100Mbit connection to stream a simple 10Mbit video (almost saturating the connection).
A little more detailed analysis can be found on the ps3mediaserver forums and a lengthy discussion (but no solution) can be found here.
That's funny, I thought Iran's F14's never flew again after Grumman pulled out all their service techs and stopped delivering parts.
Wikipedia disagrees. They claim to have up to 60 (out of 79) F-14 still operational and updated with their own (and Russian) tech. That is some thirty years since Grumman pulled out of the Iran.
With so many sources agreeing that "Wilhelm" is one of his first names it must be right!
So, Mr. von und zu Guttenberg: You better get your passport checked, there seems to be one name missing on it!
BTW if you can read german you can find a anonymous blog entry from the guy who added the "Wilhelm" to Wikipedia.
On that page I loved the quote from the "Süddeutsche" newspaper which translates into something like:
"...and his ten first names. Somtimes Guttenberg lists them. If you really ask him: Karl(1) Theodor(2) Maria(3) Nikolaus(4) Johann(5) Jacob(6) Philipp(7) Wilhelm(8) Franz(9) Joseph(10) Sylvester(11)"
(emphasis & numbers mine)
So they knew he had 10 names, but never bothered to count the names they copied from Wikipedia)
This is getting very much off-topic, but as the parent has been moderated as "Interesting" I would like to point out that in Germany cyclist are very much expected to stay on the road, unless there is a dedicated cyclist lane on the sidewalk.
Only Children up to 8 years have to use the sidewalk and after their 10th birthday they have to use the road / dedicated bike lane (between 8 and 10 they can use either).
For an American this is the obvious error message to refill the Letter-size paper cassette.
For all non-Americans here: This was a really common and annoying error message, standing in front of a printer with all paper trays full of A4 paper and having no idea what "Letter" your "PC" should "load".
In an office I once worked this was driving me crazy because the IT department fucked up the standard Windows installation and while they changed the default MS Office paper size to "A4", somewhere in Windows "letter" was still the default paper size, sneaking up all the time. So it was quite common to go to the printer to see the message, often caused by someone else.
So far most comments I have read say that "first to file" is a bad thing. I think it is a good thing because it will prevent some patent trolls and submarine patents.
For example: I have written in my lab journal 45 applications for a anti-gravity device (like "lifting something" and "lifting something with people inside" etc.). So i am the first to invent them.
Problem is I have no idea how an anti-gravity device is suppose to work. Doesn't matter because someone else will invent this eventually. I won't patent them now because it is somewhat unlikely that an anti-gravity device will be invented in the next 15 years.
But as soon as someone has finally invented a anti-gravity device I will file my patent on all possible uses for anti-gravity. The original inventor might have the same 45 applications for anti-gravity in his patent, but I was first to invent these applications. So the real inventor can build as many devices as he wants, but if he wants to use them for anything useful he has to pay me.
"First to File" means that inventors and corporations can not safely sit on their inventions until it is the most profitable time to file them. They have to publish their inventions while they are still unique and non-obvious (and then the 15+ year clock starts ticking).
Not quite. At some point during the autoland, usually around 50 to 20 ft above the runway the aircraft does not follow the glideslope anymore. Instead it will do a preprogrammed flare following a fixed programm like "pull the yoke back by 2 inches and wait for touchdown" (I know that it is a little bit more complex than that). Any (vertical) disturbances during those last few seconds are not corrected and will lead to different touchdown points.
I am not saying that autoland systems do not have a dither (like from the sampling rate of the radio altimeter), but I doubt that it was put in intentionally. It is system inherent.
While you are correct that autoland has been around since the 70s, it is far from used routinely.
Pilots use autoland only when required so due to fog (visibility below roundabout 300m, depending on aircraft type). Even at London I doubt that more than 1% of all landings are made with autoland.
And the thing about hitting the exact same spot on landing is a myth, because so many factors (weight of airplane, temperature, wind, rigging of the control surfaces to name just a few) will affect the landing spot even for an autoland that it is impossible to touch down at the same spot consistently.
Why not autotakeoff as well, then we can just eliminate the human pilots altogether for nonmilitary aircraft?
Because with the current accident rate of unmanned airplanes all airlines of the world would be wiped out within months
A target accident rate of 1 crash per 2.000 flight hours like for the predator drone would mean an airplane in commercial operation has less than 6 months to live.
Folks, the safety level of unmanned aircrafts is still a few magnitudes from the current airline safety level and it will cost lots of money to get them anywhere near the level required to transport people.
Of course the corporations and their engineers who would love to get that money will tell you whatever you like to hear (and the fear of terrorists hijacking a plane seems to be much bigger than the fear of a planecrash due to a system malfunction).
While the parent was moderated Insightful I would like to point out that up to date no commercial Airplane can take off with autopilot. Take off is always done manually.
Also, even on an Autoland the pilot has to perform a few tasks like extending the landing flaps and lowering the gear. Again no airplane that I know of has these under autopilot control.
Besides, autoland for the pilots is far from leaning back and enjoying the show. Current autopilots are still limited in the operational envelope (max wind inputs etc.) and need a lot of working systems that a pilot can do without (landing signal receivers etc.). It is not uncommon for an airliner in normal operation to be restricted to "no autoland" because some subsystem is not performing nominally.
Why these Limitations? Because certifying any automatic operation on an airplane costs lots of money which is not necessary as long as a pilot can perform these operations for "free".
Not really. Dropping major version numbers has been done a long time before Sun thought about it. For example GNU Emacs lost its major number when it went from 1.12.xx to 13.something in 1985
NEDAP voting machines have been used (in small numbers) in Germany as well, including the last big goverment election of 2004.
But it seems like the german goverment really wants these machines. The offical specification for any voting machine in germany looks like it has been copied from the NEDAP specs. And the certification of these|any voting computer will not be done at the obvious choice of federal agency for computer security (BSI), but insted at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), an agency that's mostly known for keeping the official german time (and does some consulting in physics and engineering). Computer Security is definatly not on their agenda and the closest thing to certifying a voting computer the PTB has done is certifying "non-automatic weighing instruments".
(Source and suggested reading for german readers: c't magazine, 20/06)
I don't think the pricing - which I think is very reasonable - has anything to do with the shut-down.
The real problem was the cost of the aircraft installation. I don't have any real numbers, but 200,000USD per aircraft is propably on the low side. If an airline has say 300 aircrafts that's an investment of 60,000,000USD.
Lets assume that from the 10 Bucks per hour maybe $1 stays with the airline, it would have to sell some 60 million hours of internet time until break even.
Carriers like Lufthansa used the service as a marketing tool to sell more tickets - especially the really expensive long-range business class tickets. But in the american market, where price is almost everything, propably no airline would take the risk to increase ticket prices (which you have to do if you sell the internet at a loss) just on the chance that many travellers desperatly need to have internet on a domestic flight.
False. Cell phones DO work at high altitudes. High altitudes gives them good LOS to multiple cell towers.
Well, it depends...
GSM does not like it when a cell phone sees to many towers. So over areas with high cell tower density GSM phones will not connect even at low altitudes, sometimes 2-3.000 ft is enough to shut the phone up. However GSM phones will work even at high altitudes over areas with very few cell towers, like north africa or rural areas in the US. (IIRC nominal range of a full power GSM station is around 35 kilometers - much more than an aircraft at max. 12k)
Also the american non-GSM cell phone systems seem to be less picky about the number of receivable ground stations so there are more "success" stories from the US about getting a cell phone connection in flight.
About 10 years ago, on a night flight, I saw a meteor scratch the atmosphere.
It started of as an orange glowing object on the horizon and within about 20 seconds it flew directly over us, leaving a big trail of ionized air which continued to glow like an aurora for a few minutes.
Coudn't see where it went thereafter (no rear view mirrors in the cockpit:-) but as it seemed to be traveling on a straight trajectory I assume that it left the atmosphere again.
At first I thought it was a rocket, but it was to big for anything that would be fired over the Bay of Biscay.
Hard to tell the size and distance of the object, but it looked a bit like the one Meteor captured on video as it flies over a mountain range.
No, an aircraft is never "international territory". Either the laws of the country of registration or the laws of the country overflown or the laws of the country where it is sitting on the ground apply. Often all apply at the same time
To make live a bit easier for those involved, the international Conventions by the ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organisation) have been established. But they are just that - conventions, not laws.
Fueling without opening the doors: possible in theory but usually at minimum an outside check by the pilot is reguired. Also some airports as well as some airlines do not allow fueling with passengers on board for safety reasons.
Besides, on long distance flights with a fuel stop you want to give the passengers some time to stretch their legs (but not by standing in line at immigration)
I have had the same experience transiting the US as the GP, e.g. flying from Montego Bay, Jamaica to Cancun, Mexico - unfortunatly via Miami. Took minimum of 3 hours standing in many lines (immigration, check-in, security, passport control etc.)
Unpleasant and IMHO completly unnecessary.
Slashdot Mirror
The Arduino Tre looks interesting, but it basically is an Arduino Uno bolted on top of a Raspberry Pi, while the Intel Galileo is a Raspberry Pi (sans HDMI) emulating an Arduino Uno.
I think neither will be much of a success because they will be too expensive due to the cruft they carry around to ensure a compatibility that is IMHO not needed.
While I like the idea of having an Arduino compatible board running Linux to do some more advanced projects, I don't understand what drove Intel to force this board to be Arduino compatible. The Quark processor is not designed for this sort of stuff as it has neither a sufficient number of GPIO pins nor any ADCs. It sure has a lot of interfaces (SPI, I2C, PCI-E, SD-Card, Serial etc.), but it lacks the things that are useful for a hacker project.
So they had to include a separate GPIO extender chip (over a slow I2C interconnect) as well as an separate ADC. The Quark SoC has some 15 GPIO Pins, the extender another 40. But of those 55 Pins only 20 GPIO pins are actually available on the Arduino shield pins -- the rest is used for all the Muxes to switch pins between the ADC, the GPIO Extender and the Quark SoC to emulate the flexibility of the Arduino AVR processor.
While I haven't looked at the actual PCB schematic, I think the board layout is also strange. The ADC is on the opposite side from the analog input pins, meaning that all analog signals have to travel a long distance in the vicinity of some high speed digital signals. And the GPIO Extender Chip is on the opposite corner from all the digital output pins.
This, together with the BGA devices (SoC, RAM), seem to indicate that this is at least an 6 layer board which will make it hard to clone this design -- something that IMHO has contributed to the success of the Arduino. The Schematic for this board has 27 pages compared to the single page of the Arduino Uno
It seems that this Board is designed more as a competitor to the Raspberry Pi than to the Arduino, both in price and in features.The Arduino compatibility is just some marketing thing which makes the board overly complex and more expensive than it needs to be.
But hey, it sure must be fun to employ a few million transistors and a full blown operating system to run the Arduino Blink demo :-)
Just make sure you hook up your console with an Ethernet cable - I got a lot of stuttering on fast-paced video over the wireless.
Unfortunately the PS3 network stack has been broken for years. Due to constantly dropping the connection and retransmitting everything multiple times, the PS3 needs about 5x - 10x more bandwidth than the actual video stream has. So you'll need a 100Mbit connection to stream a simple 10Mbit video (almost saturating the connection).
A little more detailed analysis can be found on the ps3mediaserver forums and a lengthy discussion (but no solution) can be found here.
That's funny, I thought Iran's F14's never flew again after Grumman pulled out all their service techs and stopped delivering parts.
Wikipedia disagrees. They claim to have up to 60 (out of 79) F-14 still operational and updated with their own (and Russian) tech. That is some thirty years since Grumman pulled out of the Iran.
starting next month Verizon will add a new " FCC Regulatory Compliance Tax* " of $1.99 to all bills.
*<supersmall><evensmaller><color ="almost-white">This is not a real tax, just a fee we need to pay for our fines</color></evensmaller></supersmall>
...V8 petrol engine.
which incidentaly makes a very nice replacement for a
...12w food blender electric motor...
Google results with "Wilhelm" = 2060 results.
With so many sources agreeing that "Wilhelm" is one of his first names it must be right!
So, Mr. von und zu Guttenberg: You better get your passport checked, there seems to be one name missing on it!
BTW if you can read german you can find a anonymous blog entry from the guy who added the "Wilhelm" to Wikipedia.
On that page I loved the quote from the "Süddeutsche" newspaper which translates into something like:
"...and his ten first names. Somtimes Guttenberg lists them. If you really ask him: Karl(1) Theodor(2) Maria(3) Nikolaus(4) Johann(5) Jacob(6) Philipp(7) Wilhelm(8) Franz(9) Joseph(10) Sylvester(11)"
(emphasis & numbers mine) So they knew he had 10 names, but never bothered to count the names they copied from Wikipedia)
But it might have sharp edges and they don't want to get sued for $10 million if you cut your finger touching it.
Besides they probably want to collect it first to get all the eBay profits for themselves.
This is getting very much off-topic, but as the parent has been moderated as "Interesting" I would like to point out that in Germany cyclist are very much expected to stay on the road, unless there is a dedicated cyclist lane on the sidewalk.
Only Children up to 8 years have to use the sidewalk and after their 10th birthday they have to use the road / dedicated bike lane (between 8 and 10 they can use either).
For an American this is the obvious error message to refill the Letter-size paper cassette.
For all non-Americans here: This was a really common and annoying error message, standing in front of a printer with all paper trays full of A4 paper and having no idea what "Letter" your "PC" should "load".
In an office I once worked this was driving me crazy because the IT department fucked up the standard Windows installation and while they changed the default MS Office paper size to "A4", somewhere in Windows "letter" was still the default paper size, sneaking up all the time. So it was quite common to go to the printer to see the message, often caused by someone else.
Well, at last the Mouse will finally become public domain at about that time.
I'm looking forward to get my free copy of Steamboat Willie..........
So far most comments I have read say that "first to file" is a bad thing. I think it is a good thing because it will prevent some patent trolls and submarine patents.
For example: I have written in my lab journal 45 applications for a anti-gravity device (like "lifting something" and "lifting something with people inside" etc.). So i am the first to invent them.
Problem is I have no idea how an anti-gravity device is suppose to work. Doesn't matter because someone else will invent this eventually. I won't patent them now because it is somewhat unlikely that an anti-gravity device will be invented in the next 15 years.
But as soon as someone has finally invented a anti-gravity device I will file my patent on all possible uses for anti-gravity. The original inventor might have the same 45 applications for anti-gravity in his patent, but I was first to invent these applications. So the real inventor can build as many devices as he wants, but if he wants to use them for anything useful he has to pay me.
"First to File" means that inventors and corporations can not safely sit on their inventions until it is the most profitable time to file them. They have to publish their inventions while they are still unique and non-obvious (and then the 15+ year clock starts ticking).
Just my 2 cents
Not quite. At some point during the autoland, usually around 50 to 20 ft above the runway the aircraft does not follow the glideslope anymore. Instead it will do a preprogrammed flare following a fixed programm like "pull the yoke back by 2 inches and wait for touchdown" (I know that it is a little bit more complex than that). Any (vertical) disturbances during those last few seconds are not corrected and will lead to different touchdown points.
I am not saying that autoland systems do not have a dither (like from the sampling rate of the radio altimeter), but I doubt that it was put in intentionally. It is system inherent.
While you are correct that autoland has been around since the 70s, it is far from used routinely.
Pilots use autoland only when required so due to fog (visibility below roundabout 300m, depending on aircraft type). Even at London I doubt that more than 1% of all landings are made with autoland.
And the thing about hitting the exact same spot on landing is a myth, because so many factors (weight of airplane, temperature, wind, rigging of the control surfaces to name just a few) will affect the landing spot even for an autoland that it is impossible to touch down at the same spot consistently.
Disclaimer: I earn my living flying airplanes
Because with the current accident rate of unmanned airplanes all airlines of the world would be wiped out within months
A target accident rate of 1 crash per 2.000 flight hours like for the predator drone would mean an airplane in commercial operation has less than 6 months to live.
Folks, the safety level of unmanned aircrafts is still a few magnitudes from the current airline safety level and it will cost lots of money to get them anywhere near the level required to transport people.
Of course the corporations and their engineers who would love to get that money will tell you whatever you like to hear (and the fear of terrorists hijacking a plane seems to be much bigger than the fear of a planecrash due to a system malfunction).
While the parent was moderated Insightful I would like to point out that up to date no commercial Airplane can take off with autopilot. Take off is always done manually.
Also, even on an Autoland the pilot has to perform a few tasks like extending the landing flaps and lowering the gear. Again no airplane that I know of has these under autopilot control.
Besides, autoland for the pilots is far from leaning back and enjoying the show. Current autopilots are still limited in the operational envelope (max wind inputs etc.) and need a lot of working systems that a pilot can do without (landing signal receivers etc.). It is not uncommon for an airliner in normal operation to be restricted to "no autoland" because some subsystem is not performing nominally.
Why these Limitations? Because certifying any automatic operation on an airplane costs lots of money which is not necessary as long as a pilot can perform these operations for "free".
Disclaimer: I earn my living flying airplanes.
I see no danger in this as you are quite obviously not referring to the Olympic® Winter® Games® 2010® in Vancouver®.
Not really. Dropping major version numbers has been done a long time before Sun thought about it. For example GNU Emacs lost its major number when it went from 1.12.xx to 13.something in 1985
NEDAP voting machines have been used (in small numbers) in Germany as well, including the last big goverment election of 2004.
But it seems like the german goverment really wants these machines. The offical specification for any voting machine in germany looks like it has been copied from the NEDAP specs. And the certification of these|any voting computer will not be done at the obvious choice of federal agency for computer security (BSI), but insted at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), an agency that's mostly known for keeping the official german time (and does some consulting in physics and engineering). Computer Security is definatly not on their agenda and the closest thing to certifying a voting computer the PTB has done is certifying "non-automatic weighing instruments". (Source and suggested reading for german readers: c't magazine, 20/06)
The Object Formerly Classified As Planet.
I'd say being able to reading Slashdot on a boring long distance flight is $27 well spend.
I don't think the pricing - which I think is very reasonable - has anything to do with the shut-down.
The real problem was the cost of the aircraft installation. I don't have any real numbers, but 200,000USD per aircraft is propably on the low side. If an airline has say 300 aircrafts that's an investment of 60,000,000USD.
Lets assume that from the 10 Bucks per hour maybe $1 stays with the airline, it would have to sell some 60 million hours of internet time until break even.
Carriers like Lufthansa used the service as a marketing tool to sell more tickets - especially the really expensive long-range business class tickets. But in the american market, where price is almost everything, propably no airline would take the risk to increase ticket prices (which you have to do if you sell the internet at a loss) just on the chance that many travellers desperatly need to have internet on a domestic flight.
Well, it depends...
GSM does not like it when a cell phone sees to many towers. So over areas with high cell tower density GSM phones will not connect even at low altitudes, sometimes 2-3.000 ft is enough to shut the phone up. However GSM phones will work even at high altitudes over areas with very few cell towers, like north africa or rural areas in the US. (IIRC nominal range of a full power GSM station is around 35 kilometers - much more than an aircraft at max. 12k)
Also the american non-GSM cell phone systems seem to be less picky about the number of receivable ground stations so there are more "success" stories from the US about getting a cell phone connection in flight.
About 10 years ago, on a night flight, I saw a meteor scratch the atmosphere. :-) but as it seemed to be traveling on a straight trajectory I assume that it left the atmosphere again.
At first I thought it was a rocket, but it was to big for anything that would be fired over the Bay of Biscay.
It started of as an orange glowing object on the horizon and within about 20 seconds it flew directly over us, leaving a big trail of ionized air which continued to glow like an aurora for a few minutes.
Coudn't see where it went thereafter (no rear view mirrors in the cockpit
Hard to tell the size and distance of the object, but it looked a bit like the one Meteor captured on video as it flies over a mountain range.
No, an aircraft is never "international territory". Either the laws of the country of registration or the laws of the country overflown or the laws of the country where it is sitting on the ground apply. Often all apply at the same time
To make live a bit easier for those involved, the international Conventions by the ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organisation) have been established. But they are just that - conventions, not laws.
Fueling without opening the doors: possible in theory but usually at minimum an outside check by the pilot is reguired. Also some airports as well as some airlines do not allow fueling with passengers on board for safety reasons. Besides, on long distance flights with a fuel stop you want to give the passengers some time to stretch their legs (but not by standing in line at immigration)
I have had the same experience transiting the US as the GP, e.g. flying from Montego Bay, Jamaica to Cancun, Mexico - unfortunatly via Miami. Took minimum of 3 hours standing in many lines (immigration, check-in, security, passport control etc.)
Unpleasant and IMHO completly unnecessary.