As the committee begins to discuss ideas, patent them behind the scenes
Dont implement standards properly (IE, Office, TransactSQL...), but do implement own proprietary protocols/specs/language correctly.
Scare people away from standards using patents
Profit!
I mean - these MS guys sat on the standards committee knowing that they had already attempted to patent what the standards committee was discussing. I bet they didn't disclose that to the committee! Dishonest - but brilliant.
Even for Microsoft, this one reeks.
Having said that, you can understand why Microsoft are claiming patent territory - they have been smackedaroundprettybadly by software patents in the past.
I wonder how many other gems are out there waiting to be discovered in amongst the 3000 or so patent apps per year MS puts forward.
You are right - its not a perfect law. But lets not get that in the way of making a start as best we can.
In the perfect world, perhaps the world would all use RSACi and all browsers would implement RSACi properly. But RSACi isn't perfect - as you say it doesn't implement a way to notify users of all types of content that they may wish to avoid.
<dons bullet proof vest>
<dons helmet>
Actually - I dont think this is a bad law. ducks
I agree with the intent of the sadly not-very-well-known RSACi system whereby sites have ratings and people configure their browser to show sites with ratings they want to see. This permits individuals to make choices for themselves as to the type of content they (and their family) see. It looks like this law simply forces people to rate their sites.
Further, the law permits you to ask your ISP to block content you deem inappropriate.
No-one is getting censored here, no content is being blocked if you dont want it.
Note that as far as I can tell, firefox doesn't support RSACi.
Anyone who is in two minds about this should simply try Outlook Web Access in Exchange 2k3. You have the option of the 'Premier' interface in IE (its very very good - good enough to ditch lookOut) or 'Standard' in anything else (which is ok, but relative to Premier its poor).
Richness of web apps is MSs bet on what will force a new defacto standard for the web. Remember - MS **do not care** about standards - they care about customer lock in, they care about protection of their dominant position on the desktop and (at the most basic) the bottom line.
So with that in mind - look at what is coming down the pipeline:
.Net - lock in to Windows (Ignore Mono - MS will work hard on FUD to make it unpalatable to corporates, and if it doesn't go away they will pull out a few dozen of their patents)
C# - lock in (see above on Mono). Now this was a brilliant move - instead of having everyone develop in a language (C++) that was *just* portable (if you used the right syntax and libraries and twisted your tongue just the right way), they create a completely new windows only language. Just brilliant. And even better, we are jumping on the C# bandwagon at a staggering rate.
IE7 - "better implementation of standards", which in reality means a whole new set of subtle incompatibilities and no support for css2. End result - web devs pick IE or spend hours trying to make code look good in Firefox, Mozilla, Opera blah blah. Lock in!
Win32, no sorry WinForms, damn! I mean XAML.
Proprietary SOAP compression. I mean DAMN how do you take a reasonable standard like SOAP (aside from it being far>/i> more complex than it should be) and add non-portable compression! I smell.... lock in.
Remember people - MS are being good corporate citizens if they look after their shareholders, which means revenue, which means a dominant position. Gotta love capitalism.
As per the article - it depends on the way it fails.
I bought a friend an LCD and it had a single pixel fault - bright green always on right in the middle. Made the display unusable. Manufacturer pointed to their returns policy of 5 deal pixels and would not accept it back.
If the pixel had been at the corner - no problem.
Problem with looking for CPU failures is that there are a very large number of ways chips could fail - and for each of these you have to try and ascertain what the impact of the failure is.
It would be very hard to ascertain the myriad of impacts a single gate failure could have, let alone the combinations of multiple failures.
I would hate the manufacturers to create a second tier of CPUs at a lower price point - the ways these chips could cause my s/w to fail would be vexing.
Linux is forking, perhaps not the kernel (yet), but LINUX (the apps and environment) is.
I worked on a product in the early 90's running on Unix. We supported a large number of different unixii, placing an enormous build, test, develop load that just should not have been there.
Our build script would test the version of unix for all sorts of bugs unique to each type (being system s/w, these bugs impacted us hugely). Our source and makefiles where littered with ifdefs to get around them on different systems.
We are well on the way to heading down the same path now. Release systems are different (.rpm?,.deb? etc), OS's are subtly different - system files move, boot scripts are organised differently.
Windows isn't perfect - there have been lots of changes as time moved on (e.g. registry, APIs, MSIs etc) but my app written for 9x still installs and runs on XP. Thats pretty impressive.
Forking is bad, bad, bad. It might not be the death of linux (there's always geeks like us who run it, and solid use cases in corporates) but its an impediment to development, to products, to consumer acceptance.
For example - I was just on a group where VIA were lambasted for only releasing some drivers for about a dozen varieties/versions/installers of linux. Cmon - thats a major effort and I take my hat off to them. But its no-where good enough to cover the broad scope that you need, and indeed my FC3 machine was not in the list.
I built a myth PVR based on an EPIA board. While that machine is awesome (quiet, small, reliable), it was a major mission to get it there.
The M and MII boards have well documentedDMAissues
There have been many attempts to contact VIA to discuss these, all have been actively ignored (we are pretty sure they are getting the messages).
What concerns me is that the problem has been fixed in windows, but Via wont even talk to linux people about it. That indicates a certain lack of interest in the linuxworld that bodes badly should problems arise with these new mobos. I would be very circumspect about picking up another mobo from them unless I was sure I wouldn't need support.
Standards are a wonderful thing. And MS (bless their corporate hearts) have established a defacto standard for GUIs. Its not perfect, but its pretty good and most computer users know it.
(Before you jump all over this one regarding who copied who and motif and Xerox Parc blah blah blah, take note: thats not the point - MS took GUIs to the masses and established a standard.)
So given the defacto standard is there, you can either create something wild and new and get the respect of geeks like us, or you can create a better GUI based on MS's one and get the respect of the masses.
When average joe strolls up to an MS PC and a Linspire PC sitting side by side at Walmart or Best Buy on a budget PC, and the MS one runs slower and is more expensive but they are otherwise very similar.... suddenly Linux is in with a chance. Its kinda sad that they couldn't keep using the name Lindows, that would have helped.
I think we agree there - WinXP is unlikely to run your telco and your bank/insurance backend for a while.
Linux, however, has the capability to replace solaris. It will take work by IBM (and maybe redhat, but I am not sure they get the Enterprise space you).
What I may need to restate is that MS is a great marketing company and, whether or not their technology stinks, truckloads of people buy it. So we (the dev community who sell their brains to the highest bidder) build software for it.
I do get it, but maybe from a different angle. Having another another OS OS (Open Source OS) doesn't improve the situation - it really messes it up.
Love em or hate em - there is only one MS. And you know just where to get software and who to turn to when there's a problem.
Consumers (the great unwashed, not the really squeeky clean like you and me who know what their doing) want a single choice. And linux doesn't give that to them. And without them (bless their hearts) there's going to be no epiphany of the gestault - no sudden greater understanding that Bills and bad boy and you should listen to Linus.
My reasoning is as follows... I worked on a product where we supported 37 different variants of unix. What a nightmare, we had config scripts up the wazoo. And now linux is: a) going down the same path b) doing it a damn sight faster c) adding the joy of kernel-version-hell to the joy of dll-hell and distro-hell.
For all we hate MS - there is only one MS. And one XP. And I can write s/w today that will work tomorrow, and probably for several years. And wont need 20 installers nor to be re-released for each kernel mod.
MS have their own problems - they are releasing dev tools and s/w faster than people can really deal with them. Hell, we still want to write code in MFC (or is that winforms, no wait. Thats obsolete already).
MS are just such a great marketing organisation that we may as well jump on for the (very expensive) ride. Because everyone else does. And *thats* what really matters, the customers.
flamebait on... Sun is becoming increasingly irrelevant in the server and enterprise space. They have known that for a while - hence their desperate moves to 'out GPL' linux with an apparentl big s/w giveaway.
But I just dont see people giving up linux and moving to sun, instead I see the opposite. Small to mid sized accounts will increasingly see linux as the core to their infrastructure.
Sun will hold large enterprise accounts for a while until Redhat or IBM really nail the enterprise feature set. Sun will also hold on to its hardware business for a while - but as google has shown, throwing gobs of cheap h/w at a problem is way more effective than high end servers.
After that, its going to be bye bye sun.
In fact, I predict Sun will become another linux vendor, just like IBM, Novell.... Resistance is futile, all your base are belong to us.
Technical brilliance doesn't sell software. (see VHS vs Beta). Marketing sells software.
He is talking to the people out there who are buying MS software, or who have already bought MS software. These statements are about selling software.
These comments are not directed at technical people, their accuracy is irrelevant.
The first rule of marketing: ***its all marketing***. Everything you do and say and deliver is focused on getting s/w out the door and revenue in the door. Everything else is secondary, and that includes quality, truth, bugs.
If the customers want security, give something to make them think they have it. Which is why MS have never really needed security till now (and maybe not even now). And they still dont, not *really*. If MS *really really* needed security or they would lose market share - you can bet they would have darn good security.
I suggest you ready "Crossing the Chasm" or "Inside the Tornado". Get the early adopters on board, the move product as fast as you can and ignore the customer.
So the Chinese Army did not send in tanks to stop students protesting? - The US Govt has used the army against its own population. Check the protests in the 60's. The US regularly uses its army both overtly (iraq, grenada) and covertly (cambodia, iran, south america) against other countries.
So those executions I saw where they had the people kneel and put a bullet in their brain never happened? - The US executes a truck-load of people. In fact, this is a problem highlighted by both Amnesty International and the US Supreme Court.
So there really is freedom of religion and speech in China? - Freedom on religion and speech? No problem (as long as you are not a muslim). Yes, I will conceded that on this point, the US does provide significantly more freedoms.
And the Chinese did not lob missiles over an island full of people to keep them in line? - The US government regularly lobs missiles into cities and towns (iraq, afghanistan). Dont be fooled into thinking these 'smart bombs' are really that smart - 17,000 iraqis can't be wrong (but they are dead).
- TV does propogate myths in both directions - dont believe everything your overlords tell you.
You are right. And a little more detail is that he has probably got a low lift wing. Wing lift is proportional to velocity^2 * wing area * air density * lift-coefficient (basically aerofoil shape and angle of attack - AoA).
He's got a very small wing area so to achieve lift he needs speed, a high-lift wing shape and AoA.
He will likely have a high stall speed. (Note: you stall at an AoA, not a speed. But for a given configuration - weight, wing shape, bank angle, CoG, environment - the stall speed is constant.)
So he will be zooming along just above the ground at a high speed waiting for his speed to wash off - which it will, quite quickly because high-lift wingshapes are either very wide (large area, low cross-sectional thickness, low drag = glider) or very thick (like a wing with slats and flaps extended = high lift, high drag). Unfortunately he will need to increase his angle of attack to maintain lift, and he will still be going very fast when he 'stalls' onto the ground.
An alternative that comes to mind is the "zoom" - a sudden pull up that gains a few feet in a plane but also removes airspeed very quickly. If he times a zoom just right he might be able to turn himself into a airbrake without gaining too much height. Wouldn't want to do it myself.
Another is to live with the high speed and have wheels on the front of the suit. If you have landed a hang glider with wheels you will know what I mean - you come zooming in to touch down on wheels on the end of the bar you hold. You are lying inches from the ground as you roll.
Lastly, a comment on wing shape. He will want a very high lift from a small area, which means thick and high AoA. A good (for him) feature of those wings is high drag, so he will have the ability to remove high airspeed from freefall quickly. A bad feature is a tendency to stall if airspeed is not tightly controlled. I've just got this image of what a spin would look like...
I have a wallflower http://wallflower-systems.com/. Its well crafted (very nice wooden frame), silent and with an active matrix display - the images are great. Viewing angle is wide.
IAASPP (I am a small plane pilot). In some small planes, its no easy task to load/unload people. On C172s, you have to move the front seats all the way forward to let the back pax out. So imagine, as a pilot, trying to coordinate this with panicing people (and pilot) and a plane furiously spinning into the ground.
I like the concept and hope it works its way into the GA fleet. Problem is that the GA fleet is very old. Planes from the 50's and 60's still fly. Planes from the 70s often form the core of most aeroclub's fleet - it's just too darn expensive to replace them. I know very few pilots who fly planes less than 5 years old. Its not like a rental company that cycles its cars every 3 years.
So let me see if I have got this right...
I go to Best Buy to purchase XP for my new machine (or maybe with my new machine).
I have to go to a website *first* to review the EULA to see whether I want to agree to sign over my first born and then bend over each year for more of the same.
And I am supposed to do this on the PC I have not yet bought?
A real settlement would have meant the agreement was outside the box and in plain english. I mean how many pages does it take to say "if your computer erupts and the known universe implodes because of our software... tough. You dont own it, you can't touch it, you can't look inside it."
As an employer, I have a problem in that I am liable for the misdeeds of my staff. If they install 3rd party apps then I get to wear the cost when the BSA jackboots come knocking.
My choices seem to be:
Lock down the PC's tighter than a ducks bottom under water. Makes life pretty hard for developers.
Close my eyes and hope it goes away.
Discourage the use as best I can.
I have opted to discourage, but I know illegal s/w is out there. The BSA have contacted us but haven't yet come onsite to do an audit. Its only a matter of time...
I know of another business owner who was given a big fine. He was only out 'by a few percent', meaning a few desktops in a hundred or so. I can understand why he got out of whack - its a lot of work keeping all licensing up to date with a busy business to run.
You need to keep relativity in sentencing. In my country, rape sentences began to overtake murder sentences. Which is worse? Given the choice as a victim I'd sure be bending over for it.
Also, if rape sentences are as high as murder, then it makes sense for the rapist to kill the victim - they are harder to catch and the penalty is no worse.
Back to this case, the guy probably would have got a lighter sentence if he had simply destroyed their computers (say, in a fire, or by hacking) as opposed to trying to steal. I dont think thats right.
I disagree - I think its a great idea. First - lets tackle the technology:
Geosync orbit is 35786 km. Latency is at least 240ms one way for any packet (up and back) - higher if you are not directly under the satellite. Talk to any gamer and they would be unimpressed. With this, at 65000ft or about 20km, the latency due to distance is under 1ms.
Its cheap - as they say you can quickly drop one anywhere, anytime you need it. e.g. place one above a ballgame to deal with all the cellphone calls (and whose to say they can't lower it if the weathers ok!)
As to the market... I live in Auckland, NZ, and we have a very slow uptake of broadband due to a single provider who owns all copper to the house (read: ugly monopoly and weak government regulator). Other wireless options exist if you live close to them (e.g. if you can see the skytower). Drop one of these above the city and bingo - broadband for the price of an aerial.
I think that model is transportable - anywhere the infrastructure is too expensive or too difficult to provide broadband or telephones - simply drop in one of these. For example:
Monopoly copper to the house
Difficult terrain
Sparse neighborhoods
And they are relatively cheap - its just a balloon. A nice one, sure, but still just a balloon. One that they can take down and service. Can't do that with a satellite.
A liveCD to me is one that is bootable - and for a moment I got pretty excited. A bootable minimalist CD that pops up an XServer ready to go. Pretty cool - like a lite X terminal you can carry around on a CD.
The reality is a little less exciting - just a program you can run from a CD. (yawn).
Slashdot Mirror
- Sit in on many of the standards committees.
- As the committee begins to discuss ideas, patent them behind the scenes
- Dont implement standards properly (IE, Office, TransactSQL...), but do implement own proprietary protocols/specs/language correctly.
- Scare people away from standards using patents
- Profit!
I mean - these MS guys sat on the standards committee knowing that they had already attempted to patent what the standards committee was discussing. I bet they didn't disclose that to the committee! Dishonest - but brilliant.Even for Microsoft, this one reeks.
Having said that, you can understand why Microsoft are claiming patent territory - they have been smacked around pretty badly by software patents in the past. I wonder how many other gems are out there waiting to be discovered in amongst the 3000 or so patent apps per year MS puts forward.
In the perfect world, perhaps the world would all use RSACi and all browsers would implement RSACi properly. But RSACi isn't perfect - as you say it doesn't implement a way to notify users of all types of content that they may wish to avoid.
<dons bullet proof vest>
<dons helmet>
Actually - I dont think this is a bad law.
ducks
I agree with the intent of the sadly not-very-well-known RSACi system whereby sites have ratings and people configure their browser to show sites with ratings they want to see. This permits individuals to make choices for themselves as to the type of content they (and their family) see. It looks like this law simply forces people to rate their sites.
Further, the law permits you to ask your ISP to block content you deem inappropriate.
No-one is getting censored here, no content is being blocked if you dont want it.
Note that as far as I can tell, firefox doesn't support RSACi.
Anyone who is in two minds about this should simply try Outlook Web Access in Exchange 2k3. You have the option of the 'Premier' interface in IE (its very very good - good enough to ditch lookOut) or 'Standard' in anything else (which is ok, but relative to Premier its poor).
Richness of web apps is MSs bet on what will force a new defacto standard for the web. Remember - MS **do not care** about standards - they care about customer lock in, they care about protection of their dominant position on the desktop and (at the most basic) the bottom line.
So with that in mind - look at what is coming down the pipeline:
- .Net - lock in to Windows (Ignore Mono - MS will work hard on FUD to make it unpalatable to corporates, and if it doesn't go away they will pull out a few dozen of their patents)
- C# - lock in (see above on Mono). Now this was a brilliant move - instead of having everyone develop in a language (C++) that was *just* portable (if you used the right syntax and libraries and twisted your tongue just the right way), they create a completely new windows only language. Just brilliant. And even better, we are jumping on the C# bandwagon at a staggering rate.
- IE7 - "better implementation of standards", which in reality means a whole new set of subtle incompatibilities and no support for css2. End result - web devs pick IE or spend hours trying to make code look good in Firefox, Mozilla, Opera blah blah. Lock in!
- Win32, no sorry WinForms, damn! I mean XAML.
- Proprietary SOAP compression. I mean DAMN how do you take a reasonable standard like SOAP (aside from it being far>/i> more complex than it should be) and add non-portable compression! I smell.... lock in.
Remember people - MS are being good corporate citizens if they look after their shareholders, which means revenue, which means a dominant position. Gotta love capitalism.I bought a friend an LCD and it had a single pixel fault - bright green always on right in the middle. Made the display unusable. Manufacturer pointed to their returns policy of 5 deal pixels and would not accept it back.
If the pixel had been at the corner - no problem.
Problem with looking for CPU failures is that there are a very large number of ways chips could fail - and for each of these you have to try and ascertain what the impact of the failure is.
It would be very hard to ascertain the myriad of impacts a single gate failure could have, let alone the combinations of multiple failures.
I would hate the manufacturers to create a second tier of CPUs at a lower price point - the ways these chips could cause my s/w to fail would be vexing.
I worked on a product in the early 90's running on Unix. We supported a large number of different unixii, placing an enormous build, test, develop load that just should not have been there.
Our build script would test the version of unix for all sorts of bugs unique to each type (being system s/w, these bugs impacted us hugely). Our source and makefiles where littered with ifdefs to get around them on different systems.
We are well on the way to heading down the same path now. Release systems are different (.rpm?, .deb? etc), OS's are subtly different - system files move, boot scripts are organised differently.
Windows isn't perfect - there have been lots of changes as time moved on (e.g. registry, APIs, MSIs etc) but my app written for 9x still installs and runs on XP. Thats pretty impressive.
Forking is bad, bad, bad. It might not be the death of linux (there's always geeks like us who run it, and solid use cases in corporates) but its an impediment to development, to products, to consumer acceptance.
For example - I was just on a group where VIA were lambasted for only releasing some drivers for about a dozen varieties/versions/installers of linux. Cmon - thats a major effort and I take my hat off to them. But its no-where good enough to cover the broad scope that you need, and indeed my FC3 machine was not in the list.
Dont fork.
The M and MII boards have well documented DMA issues There have been many attempts to contact VIA to discuss these, all have been actively ignored (we are pretty sure they are getting the messages).
What concerns me is that the problem has been fixed in windows, but Via wont even talk to linux people about it. That indicates a certain lack of interest in the linuxworld that bodes badly should problems arise with these new mobos. I would be very circumspect about picking up another mobo from them unless I was sure I wouldn't need support.
Just one jilted dudes opinion.
Yeah, Dev-Cpp sounds very cool, until you try to debug. You cant set breakpoints once the app runs.
(flamebait) :-)
Another Bush term ought to do it
(/flamebait)
(Before you jump all over this one regarding who copied who and motif and Xerox Parc blah blah blah, take note: thats not the point - MS took GUIs to the masses and established a standard.)
So given the defacto standard is there, you can either create something wild and new and get the respect of geeks like us, or you can create a better GUI based on MS's one and get the respect of the masses.
When average joe strolls up to an MS PC and a Linspire PC sitting side by side at Walmart or Best Buy on a budget PC, and the MS one runs slower and is more expensive but they are otherwise very similar.... suddenly Linux is in with a chance. Its kinda sad that they couldn't keep using the name Lindows, that would have helped.
I think we agree there - WinXP is unlikely to run your telco and your bank/insurance backend for a while.
Linux, however, has the capability to replace solaris. It will take work by IBM (and maybe redhat, but I am not sure they get the Enterprise space you).
What I may need to restate is that MS is a great marketing company and, whether or not their technology stinks, truckloads of people buy it. So we (the dev community who sell their brains to the highest bidder) build software for it.
I do get it, but maybe from a different angle. Having another another OS OS (Open Source OS) doesn't improve the situation - it really messes it up.
Love em or hate em - there is only one MS. And you know just where to get software and who to turn to when there's a problem.
Consumers (the great unwashed, not the really squeeky clean like you and me who know what their doing) want a single choice. And linux doesn't give that to them. And without them (bless their hearts) there's going to be no epiphany of the gestault - no sudden greater understanding that Bills and bad boy and you should listen to Linus.
Actually, I'm an MS fanboy :-)
I dont just bend over for anyone you know.
My reasoning is as follows...
I worked on a product where we supported 37 different variants of unix. What a nightmare, we had config scripts up the wazoo. And now linux is:
a) going down the same path
b) doing it a damn sight faster
c) adding the joy of kernel-version-hell to the joy of dll-hell and distro-hell.
For all we hate MS - there is only one MS. And one XP. And I can write s/w today that will work tomorrow, and probably for several years. And wont need 20 installers nor to be re-released for each kernel mod.
MS have their own problems - they are releasing dev tools and s/w faster than people can really deal with them. Hell, we still want to write code in MFC (or is that winforms, no wait. Thats obsolete already).
MS are just such a great marketing organisation that we may as well jump on for the (very expensive) ride. Because everyone else does. And *thats* what really matters, the customers.
flamebait on...
Sun is becoming increasingly irrelevant in the server and enterprise space. They have known that for a while - hence their desperate moves to 'out GPL' linux with an apparentl big s/w giveaway.
But I just dont see people giving up linux and moving to sun, instead I see the opposite. Small to mid sized accounts will increasingly see linux as the core to their infrastructure.
Sun will hold large enterprise accounts for a while until Redhat or IBM really nail the enterprise feature set. Sun will also hold on to its hardware business for a while - but as google has shown, throwing gobs of cheap h/w at a problem is way more effective than high end servers.
After that, its going to be bye bye sun.
In fact, I predict Sun will become another linux vendor, just like IBM, Novell.... Resistance is futile, all your base are belong to us.
Technical brilliance doesn't sell software. (see VHS vs Beta). Marketing sells software.
He is talking to the people out there who are buying MS software, or who have already bought MS software. These statements are about selling software.
These comments are not directed at technical people, their accuracy is irrelevant.
The first rule of marketing: ***its all marketing***. Everything you do and say and deliver is focused on getting s/w out the door and revenue in the door. Everything else is secondary, and that includes quality, truth, bugs.
If the customers want security, give something to make them think they have it. Which is why MS have never really needed security till now (and maybe not even now). And they still dont, not *really*. If MS *really really* needed security or they would lose market share - you can bet they would have darn good security.
I suggest you ready "Crossing the Chasm" or "Inside the Tornado". Get the early adopters on board, the move product as fast as you can and ignore the customer.
Lets check these 'facts':
So the Chinese Army did not send in tanks to stop students protesting?
- The US Govt has used the army against its own population. Check the protests in the 60's. The US regularly uses its army both overtly (iraq, grenada) and covertly (cambodia, iran, south america) against other countries.
So those executions I saw where they had the people kneel and put a bullet in their brain never happened?
- The US executes a truck-load of people. In fact, this is a problem highlighted by both Amnesty International and the US Supreme Court.
So there really is freedom of religion and speech in China?
- Freedom on religion and speech? No problem (as long as you are not a muslim). Yes, I will conceded that on this point, the US does provide significantly more freedoms.
And the Chinese did not lob missiles over an island full of people to keep them in line?
- The US government regularly lobs missiles into cities and towns (iraq, afghanistan). Dont be fooled into thinking these 'smart bombs' are really that smart - 17,000 iraqis can't be wrong (but they are dead).
- TV does propogate myths in both directions - dont believe everything your overlords tell you.
He's got a very small wing area so to achieve lift he needs speed, a high-lift wing shape and AoA.
He will likely have a high stall speed. (Note: you stall at an AoA, not a speed. But for a given configuration - weight, wing shape, bank angle, CoG, environment - the stall speed is constant.)
So he will be zooming along just above the ground at a high speed waiting for his speed to wash off - which it will, quite quickly because high-lift wingshapes are either very wide (large area, low cross-sectional thickness, low drag = glider) or very thick (like a wing with slats and flaps extended = high lift, high drag). Unfortunately he will need to increase his angle of attack to maintain lift, and he will still be going very fast when he 'stalls' onto the ground.
An alternative that comes to mind is the "zoom" - a sudden pull up that gains a few feet in a plane but also removes airspeed very quickly. If he times a zoom just right he might be able to turn himself into a airbrake without gaining too much height. Wouldn't want to do it myself.
Another is to live with the high speed and have wheels on the front of the suit. If you have landed a hang glider with wheels you will know what I mean - you come zooming in to touch down on wheels on the end of the bar you hold. You are lying inches from the ground as you roll.
Lastly, a comment on wing shape. He will want a very high lift from a small area, which means thick and high AoA. A good (for him) feature of those wings is high drag, so he will have the ability to remove high airspeed from freefall quickly. A bad feature is a tendency to stall if airspeed is not tightly controlled. I've just got this image of what a spin would look like...
And its linux :-).
On a P166!
I like the concept and hope it works its way into the GA fleet. Problem is that the GA fleet is very old. Planes from the 50's and 60's still fly. Planes from the 70s often form the core of most aeroclub's fleet - it's just too darn expensive to replace them. I know very few pilots who fly planes less than 5 years old. Its not like a rental company that cycles its cars every 3 years.
I have to go to a website *first* to review the EULA to see whether I want to agree to sign over my first born and then bend over each year for more of the same.
And I am supposed to do this on the PC I have not yet bought?
A real settlement would have meant the agreement was outside the box and in plain english. I mean how many pages does it take to say "if your computer erupts and the known universe implodes because of our software... tough. You dont own it, you can't touch it, you can't look inside it."
My choices seem to be:
- Lock down the PC's tighter than a ducks bottom under water. Makes life pretty hard for developers.
- Close my eyes and hope it goes away.
- Discourage the use as best I can.
I have opted to discourage, but I know illegal s/w is out there. The BSA have contacted us but haven't yet come onsite to do an audit. Its only a matter of time...I know of another business owner who was given a big fine. He was only out 'by a few percent', meaning a few desktops in a hundred or so. I can understand why he got out of whack - its a lot of work keeping all licensing up to date with a busy business to run.
Also, if rape sentences are as high as murder, then it makes sense for the rapist to kill the victim - they are harder to catch and the penalty is no worse.
Back to this case, the guy probably would have got a lighter sentence if he had simply destroyed their computers (say, in a fire, or by hacking) as opposed to trying to steal. I dont think thats right.
A bit of common sense here - 9 *years* for hacking. That is higher than the average federal sentence for murder http://www.law.upenn.edu/fac/phrobins/OxfordDeterr enceAppendix.pdf
although lower than the average state one.
- Geosync orbit is 35786 km. Latency is at least 240ms one way for any packet (up and back) - higher if you are not directly under the satellite. Talk to any gamer and they would be unimpressed. With this, at 65000ft or about 20km, the latency due to distance is under 1ms.
- Its cheap - as they say you can quickly drop one anywhere, anytime you need it. e.g. place one above a ballgame to deal with all the cellphone calls (and whose to say they can't lower it if the weathers ok!)
As to the market... I live in Auckland, NZ, and we have a very slow uptake of broadband due to a single provider who owns all copper to the house (read: ugly monopoly and weak government regulator). Other wireless options exist if you live close to them (e.g. if you can see the skytower). Drop one of these above the city and bingo - broadband for the price of an aerial.I think that model is transportable - anywhere the infrastructure is too expensive or too difficult to provide broadband or telephones - simply drop in one of these. For example:
- Monopoly copper to the house
- Difficult terrain
- Sparse neighborhoods
And they are relatively cheap - its just a balloon. A nice one, sure, but still just a balloon. One that they can take down and service. Can't do that with a satellite.The reality is a little less exciting - just a program you can run from a CD. (yawn).