http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_progress_strip
I used to supply equipment to ATC environments, and it's comforting to know that even though they have millions of $$$'s to play with, the system integrators still understand the need for redundant systems. Every place I worked in used flightstrips alongside their computerised systems and I'm suprised that there are not using them here.
There's various places online that tell you where your nearest Pinball is, I use this one for the UK:
http://pinformer.willcoxonline.com/
A google search for "pinball locator" will reveal more.
The DS *does* run Linux, although the overhead of the kernel on such a low specced device means that it's only really useful for cli stuff:
www.dslinux.org
I'm not sure if it's possible with DOCSIS3 (or whether the ISP in question is using it, for that matter), but with DOCSIS2 it is possible for more than one cable modem to share a MAC address. This is quite common in people who want to get free internet, they simply clone the MAC address of a paying subscriber. This works fine as long as the two cable modems are on separate broadband router, so could it be possible it's just one guy selling 'cheap' internet access by method of cloned modems?
I agree that Gary Sterns loves making pinball and that Stern doesn't make as much money as they used to.
Trouble is, they are stuck in a catch-22 situation. It costs a lot of money to make a fun pinball, the cost of the designers, playfield manufacture and putting it all together all add up to be a lot. The more complicated a table is, the more it costs to produce. Also, traditionally new players don't really like playing the complicated games, as they don't have much of a clue as to what is going on.
What Stern has been doing for the last couple of years now is just knocking out machines for as cheap as possible, with little in the way of features for the more discerning 'pinhead'. This is good (I suppose) for first time players and operators, but it sucks for anyone with half an interest in pinball.
He's got rid of most of the good designers so now most Stern tables are just boring rehashes of ones from previous years. He really is treading water trying to keep the company afloat. It really is a shame to see machines from Williams/Bally during the mid-90's and what is being made today.
A lot gets said on mailing lists as to what the future of pinball is, but I'm betting is going down the same route as Harley. The baby boomer demographic who has a bit of spare cash burning in their pocket is disappearing, and once they are gone, Pinball just isn't appealing to kids who have played Xbox/PS3 etc.
I really hope another company pops up, but it's not likely.
I've been working with a guy called Brian Dominy (last time I checked he was 132rd on the wppr) who has designed and created an open source operating system that runs on the original WPC hardware found in pinball tables:
http://www.oddchange.com/freewpc/
You can use it to change the rulesets and animations for WPC games, I have to admit it's been great fun working on the project and I'd encourage others to do so as well.
Your attitude towards this is what giving me conspiracy theories. How about listening to our concerns rather than calling us a bunch of tin-foil hatters? I really think this would be better handled by another Dev, who can actually understand why so many people are upset by this. I've been speaking to Eric Jung and he agrees that this was handled very, very badly.
The only upside of this are that we have found that we cannot trust the Add-on devs to act for the good of the users.
Can we have an option in Mozilla to completely block any Add-on that is commerical? I use Firefox as I like supporting open source, not to put money in the pockets of shady companies.
They didn't do their job properly. They said they have a policy of 'No Suprises' and it's absolutely clear that this update surprised the hell out of a lot of people.
How would you like it if your nice XP system suddenly turned into Vista, because of an 'upgrade'?
Well excuse me for picking a scab as it were, but why isn't it ALL open? What are they trying to hide, apart from their incestuous relationship between the Mozilla devs and Abine?
http://www.getabine.com/team.php
Jules Polonetsky - Co chair of Future of Privacy Forum, which coincidently enough was funded by AT&T. No conflict of interest there. Chief Privacy Officer at DoubleClick, you know, the people who sell lots and lots of adverts on the internet? Seems strange that he would be interested in something that was designed to stop that?
Jim Jorgensen - CEO of AllAdvantage, you probably won't remember the name but you probably remember them as the company that tried to pioneer 'Paid to Surf' by bombarding users with adverts. Again, why would he be interested in something designed to thwart that? Why are these people interested in a company that seems to have no others means of making money apart from charging $50 to take down a youtube video?
http://www.getabine.com/deleteme/request.php?item=youtube
This company stinks, I'll continue digging because I'm sure there's more
I would really like to see the ability for me to see if an Add-on changes it's EULA during an update. Thanks for taking the time to respond to my questions.
The problem was, this wasn't an update, it was a total rewrite. Therefore I feel you were wrong to let this be allowed to downloaded via updating TACO 2.0. This should have been treated as an entirely seperate Add-on and it was very deceptive for it to be included in the TACO 2.0 update.
Maybe it's time to have rules that state if the Add-ons original function, codebase or license changes radically then it shouldn't be allowed to update via the Firefox update mechanism?
Then why does it say that on the Abine site. I'm sorry, but you should be ashamed to let this past you. It went from 8K to 3MB, that is not a simple update and I fear this is breeding a lot of mistrust in the Firefox update mechanism. How are you going to regain users trust after this?
It gets worse, check this page out:
http://forums.passwordmaker.org/index.php/topic,1654.0.html
Surely it's a massive conflict of interest for Eric Jung to be a board member of the Mozilla Add-ons governing board and to be actively working on an Add-on, especially one like this?
This way, they can sell the data on and still stick to their 'privacy policy':
"Our Abine browser add-on uses hashes of unique identifiers that are not tied to you or your IP address, to help you track versions and updates for the add-on, and a different set of randomly generated identifiers to validate service requests such as creating or updating disposable email addresses. If you chose to provide more data in order to take advantage of additional services, such as webmail, add-on identifiers are never used in a way that ties it to your name or personal information to the best of our ability."
Also, Eric Jung is on their 'Advisory board':
http://abine.com/team.php
If you don't know who he is, he is a board member of Mozilla Add-Ons governing board. This 'update' has made a mockery of the update mechanism in Firefox and severely undermines it in my view. Here's a link to the support board over at Abine, where I have been voicing my disapproval and I recommend you do the same:
https://www.getabine.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7&start=10#p37
Another lie I've seen pushed by the credit card companies is that it's quicker to pay by card than cash. This is an out and out lie, the companies prefer card as it stops the cashiers having to handle cash.
Fair enough, if you buy a tin of beans with a high demonination note, it may take a while, but it's still quicker than some of the card terminals I've had to use.
Also I prefer the whole "Most of my money is kept secret by this number I don't use too often" over "All my money is protected by a number I use everyday".
Coming from someone who used to supply ATC equipme
on
Terminal Chaos
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· Score: 1
I wouldn't say it's a case of "a technologically outdated air traffic control system", as you wouldn't believe the amount of money that gets poured into the business.
On the whole the actual tech isn't that bad/old but there is a lot of "If it isn't broke, don't fix it" mentality, which I totally believe in. The other problem with new equipment is that there are so many rules and regulations it's very hard for equipment/software to be certified for use.
The area where modern technology can play a big role is in radar tracking. I remember seeing one tracking system that took up an entire rack, with 5-6 servers, yet could only efficiently track a small number of planes accurately and they all required 'tinkering' to get the best results.
One thing that did surprise me was the fact that because a typical ATC screen has 2048x2048 pixels (they are square because historically they used circular radar sweeps), they don't have a reliable method to record the video signal going to the monitor. Hence, most ATC recording systems relying on 'sniffing' the data as it goes through the graphics processor and then replaying it at a later date. This causes all sorts of problems, like tracks not being displayed exactly the same etc etc
A lot of the places I went into had billions of $'s worth of equipment, yet they still passed around bits of wood with flight strips on them. Paper doesn't crash.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_progress_strip I used to supply equipment to ATC environments, and it's comforting to know that even though they have millions of $$$'s to play with, the system integrators still understand the need for redundant systems. Every place I worked in used flightstrips alongside their computerised systems and I'm suprised that there are not using them here.
There's various places online that tell you where your nearest Pinball is, I use this one for the UK: http://pinformer.willcoxonline.com/ A google search for "pinball locator" will reveal more.
The first game I ever played that was genuinely and intentionally laugh-out-loud funny.
The goddamn Germans ain't got nothing to do with it! (Apologies to Jackie Gleason)
I wouldn't trust Abine with anything after the way they sneakily bought out a trusted extension and shoe horned in their crap: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/17/firefox_taco_addon_beefs_up/
The DS *does* run Linux, although the overhead of the kernel on such a low specced device means that it's only really useful for cli stuff: www.dslinux.org
I'm not sure if it's possible with DOCSIS3 (or whether the ISP in question is using it, for that matter), but with DOCSIS2 it is possible for more than one cable modem to share a MAC address. This is quite common in people who want to get free internet, they simply clone the MAC address of a paying subscriber. This works fine as long as the two cable modems are on separate broadband router, so could it be possible it's just one guy selling 'cheap' internet access by method of cloned modems?
No, because Chelloveck doesn't own the rights to make the update, even if they still had the tools to do so.
I agree that Gary Sterns loves making pinball and that Stern doesn't make as much money as they used to. Trouble is, they are stuck in a catch-22 situation. It costs a lot of money to make a fun pinball, the cost of the designers, playfield manufacture and putting it all together all add up to be a lot. The more complicated a table is, the more it costs to produce. Also, traditionally new players don't really like playing the complicated games, as they don't have much of a clue as to what is going on. What Stern has been doing for the last couple of years now is just knocking out machines for as cheap as possible, with little in the way of features for the more discerning 'pinhead'. This is good (I suppose) for first time players and operators, but it sucks for anyone with half an interest in pinball. He's got rid of most of the good designers so now most Stern tables are just boring rehashes of ones from previous years. He really is treading water trying to keep the company afloat. It really is a shame to see machines from Williams/Bally during the mid-90's and what is being made today. A lot gets said on mailing lists as to what the future of pinball is, but I'm betting is going down the same route as Harley. The baby boomer demographic who has a bit of spare cash burning in their pocket is disappearing, and once they are gone, Pinball just isn't appealing to kids who have played Xbox/PS3 etc. I really hope another company pops up, but it's not likely.
I've been working with a guy called Brian Dominy (last time I checked he was 132rd on the wppr) who has designed and created an open source operating system that runs on the original WPC hardware found in pinball tables: http://www.oddchange.com/freewpc/ You can use it to change the rulesets and animations for WPC games, I have to admit it's been great fun working on the project and I'd encourage others to do so as well.
Your attitude towards this is what giving me conspiracy theories. How about listening to our concerns rather than calling us a bunch of tin-foil hatters? I really think this would be better handled by another Dev, who can actually understand why so many people are upset by this. I've been speaking to Eric Jung and he agrees that this was handled very, very badly. The only upside of this are that we have found that we cannot trust the Add-on devs to act for the good of the users.
Can we have an option in Mozilla to completely block any Add-on that is commerical? I use Firefox as I like supporting open source, not to put money in the pockets of shady companies.
They didn't do their job properly. They said they have a policy of 'No Suprises' and it's absolutely clear that this update surprised the hell out of a lot of people. How would you like it if your nice XP system suddenly turned into Vista, because of an 'upgrade'?
Well excuse me for picking a scab as it were, but why isn't it ALL open? What are they trying to hide, apart from their incestuous relationship between the Mozilla devs and Abine?
But it's not open source?
http://www.getabine.com/team.php Jules Polonetsky - Co chair of Future of Privacy Forum, which coincidently enough was funded by AT&T. No conflict of interest there. Chief Privacy Officer at DoubleClick, you know, the people who sell lots and lots of adverts on the internet? Seems strange that he would be interested in something that was designed to stop that? Jim Jorgensen - CEO of AllAdvantage, you probably won't remember the name but you probably remember them as the company that tried to pioneer 'Paid to Surf' by bombarding users with adverts. Again, why would he be interested in something designed to thwart that? Why are these people interested in a company that seems to have no others means of making money apart from charging $50 to take down a youtube video? http://www.getabine.com/deleteme/request.php?item=youtube This company stinks, I'll continue digging because I'm sure there's more
I would really like to see the ability for me to see if an Add-on changes it's EULA during an update. Thanks for taking the time to respond to my questions.
The problem was, this wasn't an update, it was a total rewrite. Therefore I feel you were wrong to let this be allowed to downloaded via updating TACO 2.0. This should have been treated as an entirely seperate Add-on and it was very deceptive for it to be included in the TACO 2.0 update. Maybe it's time to have rules that state if the Add-ons original function, codebase or license changes radically then it shouldn't be allowed to update via the Firefox update mechanism?
Then why does it say that on the Abine site. I'm sorry, but you should be ashamed to let this past you. It went from 8K to 3MB, that is not a simple update and I fear this is breeding a lot of mistrust in the Firefox update mechanism. How are you going to regain users trust after this?
It gets worse, check this page out: http://forums.passwordmaker.org/index.php/topic,1654.0.html Surely it's a massive conflict of interest for Eric Jung to be a board member of the Mozilla Add-ons governing board and to be actively working on an Add-on, especially one like this?
This way, they can sell the data on and still stick to their 'privacy policy': "Our Abine browser add-on uses hashes of unique identifiers that are not tied to you or your IP address, to help you track versions and updates for the add-on, and a different set of randomly generated identifiers to validate service requests such as creating or updating disposable email addresses. If you chose to provide more data in order to take advantage of additional services, such as webmail, add-on identifiers are never used in a way that ties it to your name or personal information to the best of our ability." Also, Eric Jung is on their 'Advisory board': http://abine.com/team.php If you don't know who he is, he is a board member of Mozilla Add-Ons governing board. This 'update' has made a mockery of the update mechanism in Firefox and severely undermines it in my view. Here's a link to the support board over at Abine, where I have been voicing my disapproval and I recommend you do the same: https://www.getabine.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7&start=10#p37
Another lie I've seen pushed by the credit card companies is that it's quicker to pay by card than cash. This is an out and out lie, the companies prefer card as it stops the cashiers having to handle cash. Fair enough, if you buy a tin of beans with a high demonination note, it may take a while, but it's still quicker than some of the card terminals I've had to use. Also I prefer the whole "Most of my money is kept secret by this number I don't use too often" over "All my money is protected by a number I use everyday".
I wouldn't say it's a case of "a technologically outdated air traffic control system", as you wouldn't believe the amount of money that gets poured into the business. On the whole the actual tech isn't that bad/old but there is a lot of "If it isn't broke, don't fix it" mentality, which I totally believe in. The other problem with new equipment is that there are so many rules and regulations it's very hard for equipment/software to be certified for use. The area where modern technology can play a big role is in radar tracking. I remember seeing one tracking system that took up an entire rack, with 5-6 servers, yet could only efficiently track a small number of planes accurately and they all required 'tinkering' to get the best results. One thing that did surprise me was the fact that because a typical ATC screen has 2048x2048 pixels (they are square because historically they used circular radar sweeps), they don't have a reliable method to record the video signal going to the monitor. Hence, most ATC recording systems relying on 'sniffing' the data as it goes through the graphics processor and then replaying it at a later date. This causes all sorts of problems, like tracks not being displayed exactly the same etc etc A lot of the places I went into had billions of $'s worth of equipment, yet they still passed around bits of wood with flight strips on them. Paper doesn't crash.