Okay so if a distributor writes a tool to incorporate their trademark into every source file, doing it so that the trademark could not be easily identified or removed, would they have created a propitiatory source tree?
The system they are describing takes all the data for the air traffic control system and aggregates into a meaningful system. Inputs to the system are sensor data (eg radar), flight data (aircraft ABC is intended to take off from X and land at Y between these times), and input from air traffic controllers who use an HMI (Human Machine Interface) of some kind). As a former HMI developer I know that the HMI gets the blame for all faults seen on the HMI, which is hardly fair.
Outputs are instructions from the controller to aircraft directing them to safe volumes of airspace, as well as streams of information to a few external agencies, eg, the displays of flight status in airports, and external ATC systems which need to know what aircraft are flying their way.
The strips being referred to are an old way of keeping track of aircraft. Modern systems use back end data stores for that and sometimes display electronic strips on the HMI. If the electronic system goes belly up then the controllers try to go back to paper strips and hilarity ensues. It would be a bit like telling a bank to get by without computers for a day. Easier to shut the place down for the duration.
The paper strips being referred to are basically strips of thin card, about 25 by 200 mm. They are pre-printed with lines which deliminate fields. Each strip represents a Flight (or Aircraft, or Track). Fields on the strip include:
Aircraft ID
Registration
Airport of departure
Destination
Route (a list of waypoints)
Levels for each waypoint
SSR code (transponder setting, it will come up on the radar)
Cleared flight level
Arrival time
...lots of other fields are possible. These days that data will be primarily stored by software in a Flight Data Record (FDR). The ICAO defines protocols for exchanging FDRs between air traffic control centres so London can send an FDR to Paris before the aircraft even departs London.
With the ATC centre the strips were passed around as the control of aircraft was handed off between controllers. These days it is more likely the controller will hit a handoff key and select the destination sector. The strip will be software displayed on the same screen as the Track which represents the aircraft.
Totally agree. But when a tower is using a computer system from the 60's?.
Thats unlikely to be the case anywhere. Most of Africa for example, uses systems built in the last ten years, with fully electronic operation. No paper strips.
The main problem with Java is that management try to get away with arrays of inexpensive programmers who try to use methodologies from different industries. One killer problem I have seen with OO in environments where there is a lot of data being transferred is over-reliance on instantiating objects for transient data. Like read, transform, write and dispose of objects where you could just keep N objects for every step and copy the contents between them. Its not as elegant but it reduces the amount of thrashing.
the new system runs Linux, but the article also says "java". no surprise that a j2ee system would turn out be a bloated, slow steaming pile of dung. Sure, efficient coding can be done in Java, but far too often too many layers of canned commercial libraries from a certain j2ee framework vendor are employed
Java...whaaa? WTF is a garbage collected language doing anywhere near ATC?
Why not? Buffer overflows are the killer (oh the stories I could tell...) and java doesn't have them the way C does.
Electronic strips have been used across the industry for about fifteen years. They save a lot of manual labour because people had to write on them, and they save mistakes because hand writing can be misread. A convenient compromise is to use printed strips in the tower and electronic strips in the en-route and approach centres. The printed strips are easy to read and make great bookmarks;)
Custom GSM firmware could theoretically connect to a less than ideal base station and fool the trackers as to the location. Maybe preferentially use towers with low signal strength. Maybe somebody could come up with a broad band frequency hopping walkie-talkie. Perhaps a unit which uses a lot of commercial frequencies at very low power. Such a device might be useful all over the place.
On another note, the new/. posting method doesn't work with IE6. I know, I know.... IE6.... That's the company standard and I know I'm not alone here.
Which is one of the reasons Google decided to have Chrome install itself to the user profile; it doesn't require administrator access or installation privileges.
And where I work installing any software without going through IT is now a sacking offence.
An object orbiting the sun could point the sail 45 degrees away from the sun so that sun light is reflected ahead in the orbit. That way pressure from sun light would slow the object down and move it into a lower orbit. Mercury is very difficult to reach because you need to dump a lot of kinetic and potential energy to match orbits with the planet. In other words you have to go a long way down the sun's gravitational well.
for annoying technical reasons, these are linear regulators, not switching
Because capacitors are bulky? I wonder if a regulator could be made to switch at a convenient frequency, perhaps by combining the power supply with the clock, if thats not too naive an idea about how these chips operate.
So this is a way for an ALU (say) to send a message to to the MCVR saying "we need ten trillion electrons" when it is asked to a floating point multiplication, then the electrons get parcelled out and the ALU shuts down when the job is done. Sounds reasonable but there is still going to be a voltage regulator off the chip. This is more like an intelligent distribution system.
I think 15 seconds in vacuum is the limit. The lungs will empty immediately. Air is kept there by suction and you lose that in vacuum. Oxygen transport out of the blood and into vacuum means that the blood headed for the brain will have almost no oxygen so once that hits the brain you are gone. Having said that 15 seconds is enough to find the lever and close the door of the emergency airlock then pull the lever to blow the lock though I reckon the pulse of oxygen deprived blood would have knocked Bowman out for a while, giving Hal time to work out a way to finish him off.
Unless the chromosphere of the sun is surrounding you pretty much any mirror will protect you from the sun. And the mirror doesn't have to be heavy. A thin sheet of polished metal will do fine. Good film though. Along with Moon its great to see indie SF films being made.
I think we missed a great opportunity to try a medium sized solar sail. Say a couple of hundred metres in diameter. Inside the orbit of Venus a sail like that would be very efficient.
if the Sun disappeared, the Moon would still orbit the Earth.
I am not so sure to be honest. Its been a while since I had to do the calculations. I reckon it would be touch and go. There should be a way to compare the affect of the solar and terrestrial gravitational fields on the moon.
The moons distance from the Earth increases as angular momentum is transferred by tidal action. Makes me wonder if Earth and Luna will eventually co-orbit in that way. Doesn't sound very safe for us, but certainly spectacular.
Adding to catmistake's reply: we say that Jupiter orbits the Sun, but the center of gravity of those two bodies is outside the sun In any event when A orbits B it is perfectly okay to say that B orbits A. Its the same thing.
Also the moon is a moon because we call it the moon. The laws of gravity don't care what we call it just as they didn't care about me when I fell off my bike.
or even a Dyson Sphere variant at approximately 1AU?
I am quite attracted to this planet. My preference would be to build the Dyson Sphere around a different star. I am sure there are plenty of red dwarf stars out there with only gas giant planets for building material.
With over 170 languages spoken in the US alone, medical personnel attending an emergency or working in a busy hospital are no doubt often faced with communication problems when trying to dispense treatment.
And how many non-English monolingual people are there in the US?
Well if its my mother in law you will have a choice between cantonese, mandarin and hokkien but if an ambulance crew need to get information from her they will have to resort to translation.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay so if a distributor writes a tool to incorporate their trademark into every source file, doing it so that the trademark could not be easily identified or removed, would they have created a propitiatory source tree?
The system they are describing takes all the data for the air traffic control system and aggregates into a meaningful system. Inputs to the system are sensor data (eg radar), flight data (aircraft ABC is intended to take off from X and land at Y between these times), and input from air traffic controllers who use an HMI (Human Machine Interface) of some kind). As a former HMI developer I know that the HMI gets the blame for all faults seen on the HMI, which is hardly fair.
Outputs are instructions from the controller to aircraft directing them to safe volumes of airspace, as well as streams of information to a few external agencies, eg, the displays of flight status in airports, and external ATC systems which need to know what aircraft are flying their way.
The strips being referred to are an old way of keeping track of aircraft. Modern systems use back end data stores for that and sometimes display electronic strips on the HMI. If the electronic system goes belly up then the controllers try to go back to paper strips and hilarity ensues. It would be a bit like telling a bank to get by without computers for a day. Easier to shut the place down for the duration.
The paper strips being referred to are basically strips of thin card, about 25 by 200 mm. They are pre-printed with lines which deliminate fields. Each strip represents a Flight (or Aircraft, or Track). Fields on the strip include:
With the ATC centre the strips were passed around as the control of aircraft was handed off between controllers. These days it is more likely the controller will hit a handoff key and select the destination sector. The strip will be software displayed on the same screen as the Track which represents the aircraft.
Totally agree. But when a tower is using a computer system from the 60's?.
Thats unlikely to be the case anywhere. Most of Africa for example, uses systems built in the last ten years, with fully electronic operation. No paper strips.
The main problem with Java is that management try to get away with arrays of inexpensive programmers who try to use methodologies from different industries. One killer problem I have seen with OO in environments where there is a lot of data being transferred is over-reliance on instantiating objects for transient data. Like read, transform, write and dispose of objects where you could just keep N objects for every step and copy the contents between them. Its not as elegant but it reduces the amount of thrashing.
the new system runs Linux, but the article also says "java". no surprise that a j2ee system would turn out be a bloated, slow steaming pile of dung. Sure, efficient coding can be done in Java, but far too often too many layers of canned commercial libraries from a certain j2ee framework vendor are employed
Java...whaaa? WTF is a garbage collected language doing anywhere near ATC?
Why not? Buffer overflows are the killer (oh the stories I could tell...) and java doesn't have them the way C does.
Electronic strips have been used across the industry for about fifteen years. They save a lot of manual labour because people had to write on them, and they save mistakes because hand writing can be misread. A convenient compromise is to use printed strips in the tower and electronic strips in the en-route and approach centres. The printed strips are easy to read and make great bookmarks ;)
Yes
Custom GSM firmware could theoretically connect to a less than ideal base station and fool the trackers as to the location. Maybe preferentially use towers with low signal strength. Maybe somebody could come up with a broad band frequency hopping walkie-talkie. Perhaps a unit which uses a lot of commercial frequencies at very low power. Such a device might be useful all over the place.
On another note, the new /. posting method doesn't work with IE6. I know, I know.... IE6.... That's the company standard and I know I'm not alone here.
Which is one of the reasons Google decided to have Chrome install itself to the user profile; it doesn't require administrator access or installation privileges.
And where I work installing any software without going through IT is now a sacking offence.
You could still be saved by others though, after those fifteen seconds. In space, the question is for how long.
This guy survived about a minute
An object orbiting the sun could point the sail 45 degrees away from the sun so that sun light is reflected ahead in the orbit. That way pressure from sun light would slow the object down and move it into a lower orbit. Mercury is very difficult to reach because you need to dump a lot of kinetic and potential energy to match orbits with the planet. In other words you have to go a long way down the sun's gravitational well.
for annoying technical reasons, these are linear regulators, not switching
Because capacitors are bulky? I wonder if a regulator could be made to switch at a convenient frequency, perhaps by combining the power supply with the clock, if thats not too naive an idea about how these chips operate.
So this is a way for an ALU (say) to send a message to to the MCVR saying "we need ten trillion electrons" when it is asked to a floating point multiplication, then the electrons get parcelled out and the ALU shuts down when the job is done. Sounds reasonable but there is still going to be a voltage regulator off the chip. This is more like an intelligent distribution system.
I think 15 seconds in vacuum is the limit. The lungs will empty immediately. Air is kept there by suction and you lose that in vacuum. Oxygen transport out of the blood and into vacuum means that the blood headed for the brain will have almost no oxygen so once that hits the brain you are gone. Having said that 15 seconds is enough to find the lever and close the door of the emergency airlock then pull the lever to blow the lock though I reckon the pulse of oxygen deprived blood would have knocked Bowman out for a while, giving Hal time to work out a way to finish him off.
Unless the chromosphere of the sun is surrounding you pretty much any mirror will protect you from the sun. And the mirror doesn't have to be heavy. A thin sheet of polished metal will do fine. Good film though. Along with Moon its great to see indie SF films being made.
I think we missed a great opportunity to try a medium sized solar sail. Say a couple of hundred metres in diameter. Inside the orbit of Venus a sail like that would be very efficient.
the item probably costs less than a thousand to produce
Including development?
if the Sun disappeared, the Moon would still orbit the Earth.
I am not so sure to be honest. Its been a while since I had to do the calculations. I reckon it would be touch and go. There should be a way to compare the affect of the solar and terrestrial gravitational fields on the moon.
Saturn's two moons in a single orbit
The moons distance from the Earth increases as angular momentum is transferred by tidal action. Makes me wonder if Earth and Luna will eventually co-orbit in that way. Doesn't sound very safe for us, but certainly spectacular.
Adding to catmistake's reply: we say that Jupiter orbits the Sun, but the center of gravity of those two bodies is outside the sun In any event when A orbits B it is perfectly okay to say that B orbits A. Its the same thing.
Also the moon is a moon because we call it the moon. The laws of gravity don't care what we call it just as they didn't care about me when I fell off my bike.
or even a Dyson Sphere variant at approximately 1AU?
I am quite attracted to this planet. My preference would be to build the Dyson Sphere around a different star. I am sure there are plenty of red dwarf stars out there with only gas giant planets for building material.
Because we don't know how to make Scrith, and the concept terrifies the puppeteers so they won't save us from the Kzinti.
Only if it is perfectly balanced, but in the real world nothing stays in that state for ever.
With over 170 languages spoken in the US alone, medical personnel attending an emergency or working in a busy hospital are no doubt often faced with communication problems when trying to dispense treatment.
And how many non-English monolingual people are there in the US?
Well if its my mother in law you will have a choice between cantonese, mandarin and hokkien but if an ambulance crew need to get information from her they will have to resort to translation.