I'm assuming that AA has or will have Wi-Fi installed at the gates for this and that the pilots will sync the iPads as they get from station to station. I see a couple of neat possibilities:
- Immediate and instant update of flight charts and manual pages. Instead of the pilots (hundreds or even thousands!) having to update pages/plates in their Jepp books and other manuals - a very ardous and regular task that everyone has to be compliant on - you can send out updates instantly. The whole company can be instantly updated in a matter of hours or a day. - E-mail! When I worked in the airlines I can't tell you how many pilots popped into our flight ops area to borrow a computer to check e-mail, connect with crew scheduling or check updates to schedules, etc. We of course were always glad to share our computer but this makes it a lot easier and quicker for the pilots to do so without having to go anywhere. - Paperless workflow. Granted airplanes are required to carry a logbook for maintenance purposes (still on paper) but this could help facilitate maintenance writeups if they could find a different way to do this. The pages in the aircraft maintenance logbook are usually 5-ply carbonless copy papers and are difficult to read. The lines are tiny and just try writing in one while the plane is flying and you hit a bump here and there! If they could enter the maintenance writeups into an iPad and sync it when they get on the ground (or maybe even with the inflight Wi-Fi products?) that could get the wheels spinning faster for maintenance and reduce the need for actual physical paperwork.
I could see an ironic twist to all of this. Iran and North Korea could end up pooling all of their resources and make really cutting-edge antivirus and antimalware software. We've seen other countries put government money behind a problem (ie. Japan funded research to make better car factories) and solve it in this way. And when Iran and North Korea make this wonderful new software the rest of the world might just line up to to buy it. Who knows what else they will innovate. We could be creating a monster here!
So much for the Internet staying this amazing free marketplace of discourse. Since we all have jobs and need to make a living we need the anonymity afforded by these sites to say what we truly want to say. I used to get into great discussions and debates with people on various news websites, until they all started requiring you to post under your Facebook account. Conveniently my full name, photo, job title and employer get tagged in with those posts. So basically now all of my posts have to be something my employer would approve of; they are a conservative Midwestern insurance company and probably wouldn't approve of many of my ideas. You will all tell me to remove my employment information from my Facebook page but why should I have to?
The Writers Guild of America requires that all members have unique names. There cannot be two of the same person as to prevent confusion. This is evident with David X. Cohen, well known as a writer for The Simpsons and Futurama. His real name is David S. Cohen but the Writers Guild of America already had a David S., so he took David X. Cohen.
Wait, there are people who actually use Siri for a serious business-related use? They don't just ask it dumb questions in attempt to get silly answers?
"Siri, will you marry me?" "Siri, where can I hide a dead body?" "Siri, ***k you!" "Siri, what is your favorite color?"
That's the only use for Siri that I've been able to (and many of my friends for that matter) find.
I've had a bunch of 4G Androids on Verizon. 4G itself is mighty fast but Verizon bogs them down with so much bloatware that the additional speed feels pretty useless. I recently ditched the Android for an iPhone and even with the "slower" 3G service it feels comparatively fast. I've been told a million times "You need to use an alternative version of Android". I work in insurance and handle a lot of private data. I don't feel comfortable downloading some random alternate install of Android from who-knows-where on my phone.
But yes it will be a neat day when you can get a 4G iPhone for Verizon.
I wonder if the "old" generation of microcomputers - the TRS80, the Sinclair, Commodore 64, Apple II - were more inspirational to young programmers and coders than what we have today. The old computers were all command line. You *had* to know what you were doing to make the thing do anything! You couldn't break it because you had to know how the thing worked to make it do anything! And there was a joy or satisfaction of "Hey, I made this machine do 'this', exactly how I wanted it to do it!" Today's PCs/Macs/pads? Anyone can pick one up, use it, maybe even cause a lot of damage with it but never understand the inner workings of it because all you had to do to make it go is click on some icon somewhere. There is no command line to use (at least that most users would choose to work with). You can become a proficient user of it but without some real digging you will have a hard time writing any kind of usable software for yourself, even as rudimentary as a "Hello, world".
I liken it to giving a car to a starting driver. The Sinclair and other older microcomputers were like giving a kid a 20-yr old Honda Civic with a manual transmission. Slow, dependable, bland, hard to get in trouble with it, you have to know how to drive it to make it go, you can really get a feel for how the thing wants to drive. The newer, much more powerful computers of today could be like giving that same kid a Porsche - powerful, fast, stylish, easy to get in trouble with, easy to wreck at high speeds, you may never understand its inner-workings because they are too much to learn.
All of this water is great! But with all of the corrupt governments throughout Africa who will ever get to benefit from it?
I've always felt that Africa is the richest continent. It's chock-full of minerals, oil, diamonds, arable land (some land better than other land but with the right techniques just about anything is possible)... The climate is warm to hot throughout much of the continent facilitating growing. Its people? If you go to the right places hard-working, skilled and eager to work. But its corruption is widespread. Without targeting that (much easier said than done) this water will either stay in the ground or will go to benefit some dictator or other "politician".
OK so the idea may have existed in 1991 but was the technology to make it work "like" an iPhone as we know it there? NO! Without the wireless data (or really data at all!) it is useless. In fact nobody really even knew what the Internet was back in 1991. This is like having an idea for a helicopter but no motor to power it (a la Da Vinci). They may have had CDPD data back then but it was pretty slow. But without the Internet how could you really share with anyone? Was everyone supposed to use, oh, Compuserve?
Some may argue "yeah, well they could have at least bought the idea and held onto it until it was feasible." That's like if I bought the idea for a warp drive or transporter and held onto it until it becomes feasible. So many other things have to be invented or perfected before anything like that could work. I don't think I'm going to be around long enough for that to happen. And maybe Microsoft felt the same way in 1991 when presented with that iPhone-like idea.
I can't record my own audio on my Android phone but a malware app can? So let me get this straight - to get what I believe should be a regular functionality I have to have someone install a malware app? Ridiculous. This is almost like giving someone syphillis to cure them of AIDS!
No matter what they do to fix this, no matter what they do to reduce the latency I NEVER win any radio call-in shows. You would think this would help me be caller #25 but it never works. It's always busy or I just don't make that number:(
Has anybody thought this through? Is this safe? Is this going to be one of those things where we find out it gives everyone cancer in 20 yrs and it is too late to do anything about it?
Yeah I suppose they do;) I've never thought very highly of MS's apps for mobile though. They all still feel kind of sloppy. They still don't feel very mobile-centric. Windows Phone feels like it is trying to emulate a Windows PC way too much rather than be a mobile device (a la iPhone or iPad). Windows Phones and other MS mobile devices have always felt like a computer with mobile computing and phone functions as an afterthought .
Let's just say it doesn't feel like going to the Android or iPhone apps stores. I've never heard anyone say "Hey, did you get that new [game/app] from the Windows app store!!!???"
I think this signals a fundamental change in mobile computing. Microsoft has clung to a (now outdated) model of forcing the same Windows apps on all "Windows" devices. Apple saw that there needed to be a differentiation between desktop applications and mobile "apps" in order for the mobile apps to be the best for that device. Their Tablet PCs aren't the answer. The day that Microsoft figures this out and makes a way to easily create a mobile app of some kind and separates the desktop and mobile platforms they might have a chance against the iPad.
At this rate data, information and knowledge will be the new thing to smuggle. But there doesn't seem to be a "border"... yet. We will all be the mules. Like anything good they will try and cut it off. Who will be the 21st century's Pablo Escobar?
Amen brother! Back in the day HR was largely a job role for exec and director's girlfriends/wives/mistresses/daughters so that they could find them some kind of gainful employment regardless of their job skills. I have yet to find a competent and non-bitter HR person in any company I've dealt with.
I've lost hope in large corporations. They work so hard to create internal structure rather than product that they get too top-heavy. Once you get big enough there are so many people handling the internal structure it just becomes wasteful. You literally have whole departments whose only job is to tell employees about the benefits afforded to them. It is important for employees to know this stuff but this is a function that doesn't create products or sell products.
It is good that they are going to finally scan for malware. But in the end Android apps need better quality control. There are so many poorly-written apps with memory leaks. I end up having to reboot my Android at least 1x/day for no explainable reason. Android is really neat but I feel like it is one big beta test that I paid money to use.
What the Irish deem to be a tremendous flaw equals profit potential just an ocean away! Security in voting? That's overrated. You could make a mint on these things in the US. One man's trash is another man's treasure! The same deadbeat candidates from one of two overly polarized parties keep winning anyways. Get those questionable voting machines on the next steamer to New York today!
I wish it were that easy. Crazy enough there is a housing shortage here (Sioux Falls, SD) so price discovery isn't working as accurately as it does in much of the rest of the country. Where I come from you can name your price for foreclosed and underwater homes, not here. Literally everything we looked at in this size range was about the same price so that didn't help. Unlike a lot of other cities the supply of housing, both for rental and for purchase, is pretty tight. There is also a lot of variation as you go block by block. I could go a couple blocks south of here and it would be radically different. If I go about 8 blocks west of here we are talking million-dollar homes in a well-to-do subdivision from the 1920s. My house is right by a major hospital - I thought that might help improve the character of the neighborhood at least a little (it did for me a couple of apartments ago). Fortunately it is a rental and our landlord left a large gaping hole (no termination clause) in the lease making it easy to leave. We just found another house more out in the country that we are going to rent and it still has a month to go until construction is complete on it!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm assuming that AA has or will have Wi-Fi installed at the gates for this and that the pilots will sync the iPads as they get from station to station. I see a couple of neat possibilities:
- Immediate and instant update of flight charts and manual pages. Instead of the pilots (hundreds or even thousands!) having to update pages/plates in their Jepp books and other manuals - a very ardous and regular task that everyone has to be compliant on - you can send out updates instantly. The whole company can be instantly updated in a matter of hours or a day.
- E-mail! When I worked in the airlines I can't tell you how many pilots popped into our flight ops area to borrow a computer to check e-mail, connect with crew scheduling or check updates to schedules, etc. We of course were always glad to share our computer but this makes it a lot easier and quicker for the pilots to do so without having to go anywhere.
- Paperless workflow. Granted airplanes are required to carry a logbook for maintenance purposes (still on paper) but this could help facilitate maintenance writeups if they could find a different way to do this. The pages in the aircraft maintenance logbook are usually 5-ply carbonless copy papers and are difficult to read. The lines are tiny and just try writing in one while the plane is flying and you hit a bump here and there! If they could enter the maintenance writeups into an iPad and sync it when they get on the ground (or maybe even with the inflight Wi-Fi products?) that could get the wheels spinning faster for maintenance and reduce the need for actual physical paperwork.
I could see an ironic twist to all of this. Iran and North Korea could end up pooling all of their resources and make really cutting-edge antivirus and antimalware software. We've seen other countries put government money behind a problem (ie. Japan funded research to make better car factories) and solve it in this way. And when Iran and North Korea make this wonderful new software the rest of the world might just line up to to buy it. Who knows what else they will innovate. We could be creating a monster here!
So much for the Internet staying this amazing free marketplace of discourse. Since we all have jobs and need to make a living we need the anonymity afforded by these sites to say what we truly want to say. I used to get into great discussions and debates with people on various news websites, until they all started requiring you to post under your Facebook account. Conveniently my full name, photo, job title and employer get tagged in with those posts. So basically now all of my posts have to be something my employer would approve of; they are a conservative Midwestern insurance company and probably wouldn't approve of many of my ideas. You will all tell me to remove my employment information from my Facebook page but why should I have to?
One concern is if the owner is really hideous looking. There is the risk that it could shatter the camera lens and then the phone would NEVER unlock!
The Writers Guild of America requires that all members have unique names. There cannot be two of the same person as to prevent confusion. This is evident with David X. Cohen, well known as a writer for The Simpsons and Futurama. His real name is David S. Cohen but the Writers Guild of America already had a David S., so he took David X. Cohen.
Wait, there are people who actually use Siri for a serious business-related use? They don't just ask it dumb questions in attempt to get silly answers?
"Siri, will you marry me?"
"Siri, where can I hide a dead body?"
"Siri, ***k you!"
"Siri, what is your favorite color?"
That's the only use for Siri that I've been able to (and many of my friends for that matter) find.
I've had a bunch of 4G Androids on Verizon. 4G itself is mighty fast but Verizon bogs them down with so much bloatware that the additional speed feels pretty useless. I recently ditched the Android for an iPhone and even with the "slower" 3G service it feels comparatively fast. I've been told a million times "You need to use an alternative version of Android". I work in insurance and handle a lot of private data. I don't feel comfortable downloading some random alternate install of Android from who-knows-where on my phone.
But yes it will be a neat day when you can get a 4G iPhone for Verizon.
I wonder if the "old" generation of microcomputers - the TRS80, the Sinclair, Commodore 64, Apple II - were more inspirational to young programmers and coders than what we have today. The old computers were all command line. You *had* to know what you were doing to make the thing do anything! You couldn't break it because you had to know how the thing worked to make it do anything! And there was a joy or satisfaction of "Hey, I made this machine do 'this', exactly how I wanted it to do it!" Today's PCs/Macs/pads? Anyone can pick one up, use it, maybe even cause a lot of damage with it but never understand the inner workings of it because all you had to do to make it go is click on some icon somewhere. There is no command line to use (at least that most users would choose to work with). You can become a proficient user of it but without some real digging you will have a hard time writing any kind of usable software for yourself, even as rudimentary as a "Hello, world".
I liken it to giving a car to a starting driver. The Sinclair and other older microcomputers were like giving a kid a 20-yr old Honda Civic with a manual transmission. Slow, dependable, bland, hard to get in trouble with it, you have to know how to drive it to make it go, you can really get a feel for how the thing wants to drive. The newer, much more powerful computers of today could be like giving that same kid a Porsche - powerful, fast, stylish, easy to get in trouble with, easy to wreck at high speeds, you may never understand its inner-workings because they are too much to learn.
All of this water is great! But with all of the corrupt governments throughout Africa who will ever get to benefit from it?
I've always felt that Africa is the richest continent. It's chock-full of minerals, oil, diamonds, arable land (some land better than other land but with the right techniques just about anything is possible)... The climate is warm to hot throughout much of the continent facilitating growing. Its people? If you go to the right places hard-working, skilled and eager to work. But its corruption is widespread. Without targeting that (much easier said than done) this water will either stay in the ground or will go to benefit some dictator or other "politician".
Just when I thought Iran was the safest place to stash my money now THIS happens? Where should I go next? Somalia?
OK so the idea may have existed in 1991 but was the technology to make it work "like" an iPhone as we know it there? NO! Without the wireless data (or really data at all!) it is useless. In fact nobody really even knew what the Internet was back in 1991. This is like having an idea for a helicopter but no motor to power it (a la Da Vinci). They may have had CDPD data back then but it was pretty slow. But without the Internet how could you really share with anyone? Was everyone supposed to use, oh, Compuserve?
Some may argue "yeah, well they could have at least bought the idea and held onto it until it was feasible." That's like if I bought the idea for a warp drive or transporter and held onto it until it becomes feasible. So many other things have to be invented or perfected before anything like that could work. I don't think I'm going to be around long enough for that to happen. And maybe Microsoft felt the same way in 1991 when presented with that iPhone-like idea.
I can't record my own audio on my Android phone but a malware app can? So let me get this straight - to get what I believe should be a regular functionality I have to have someone install a malware app? Ridiculous. This is almost like giving someone syphillis to cure them of AIDS!
OK good one. We all know that Google likes to prepare its annual April Fools day gag but they got this one out the door too late!
No matter what they do to fix this, no matter what they do to reduce the latency I NEVER win any radio call-in shows. You would think this would help me be caller #25 but it never works. It's always busy or I just don't make that number :(
Has anybody thought this through? Is this safe? Is this going to be one of those things where we find out it gives everyone cancer in 20 yrs and it is too late to do anything about it?
I think the IT world collectively owes Merijn Bellekom some beers. Think about how many of us his tool has helped out over the years!
Yeah I suppose they do ;) I've never thought very highly of MS's apps for mobile though. They all still feel kind of sloppy. They still don't feel very mobile-centric. Windows Phone feels like it is trying to emulate a Windows PC way too much rather than be a mobile device (a la iPhone or iPad). Windows Phones and other MS mobile devices have always felt like a computer with mobile computing and phone functions as an afterthought .
Let's just say it doesn't feel like going to the Android or iPhone apps stores. I've never heard anyone say "Hey, did you get that new [game/app] from the Windows app store!!!???"
I think this signals a fundamental change in mobile computing. Microsoft has clung to a (now outdated) model of forcing the same Windows apps on all "Windows" devices. Apple saw that there needed to be a differentiation between desktop applications and mobile "apps" in order for the mobile apps to be the best for that device. Their Tablet PCs aren't the answer. The day that Microsoft figures this out and makes a way to easily create a mobile app of some kind and separates the desktop and mobile platforms they might have a chance against the iPad.
At this rate data, information and knowledge will be the new thing to smuggle. But there doesn't seem to be a "border"... yet. We will all be the mules. Like anything good they will try and cut it off. Who will be the 21st century's Pablo Escobar?
Next they will be against forms of birth control. Oh, wait...
Amen brother! Back in the day HR was largely a job role for exec and director's girlfriends/wives/mistresses/daughters so that they could find them some kind of gainful employment regardless of their job skills. I have yet to find a competent and non-bitter HR person in any company I've dealt with.
I've lost hope in large corporations. They work so hard to create internal structure rather than product that they get too top-heavy. Once you get big enough there are so many people handling the internal structure it just becomes wasteful. You literally have whole departments whose only job is to tell employees about the benefits afforded to them. It is important for employees to know this stuff but this is a function that doesn't create products or sell products.
It is good that they are going to finally scan for malware. But in the end Android apps need better quality control. There are so many poorly-written apps with memory leaks. I end up having to reboot my Android at least 1x/day for no explainable reason. Android is really neat but I feel like it is one big beta test that I paid money to use.
People still buy books?
What the Irish deem to be a tremendous flaw equals profit potential just an ocean away! Security in voting? That's overrated. You could make a mint on these things in the US. One man's trash is another man's treasure! The same deadbeat candidates from one of two overly polarized parties keep winning anyways. Get those questionable voting machines on the next steamer to New York today!
I wish it were that easy. Crazy enough there is a housing shortage here (Sioux Falls, SD) so price discovery isn't working as accurately as it does in much of the rest of the country. Where I come from you can name your price for foreclosed and underwater homes, not here. Literally everything we looked at in this size range was about the same price so that didn't help. Unlike a lot of other cities the supply of housing, both for rental and for purchase, is pretty tight. There is also a lot of variation as you go block by block. I could go a couple blocks south of here and it would be radically different. If I go about 8 blocks west of here we are talking million-dollar homes in a well-to-do subdivision from the 1920s. My house is right by a major hospital - I thought that might help improve the character of the neighborhood at least a little (it did for me a couple of apartments ago). Fortunately it is a rental and our landlord left a large gaping hole (no termination clause) in the lease making it easy to leave. We just found another house more out in the country that we are going to rent and it still has a month to go until construction is complete on it!