My information suggests that the sensors feeding the black box either cannot or were not made available to the primary flight instrument computers, astonishingly enough.
Given the amount of system isolation in aircraft this isn't entirely impossible to beleive. If you tie part B into part A's wiring in any way, you have to do more testing/verification than you would otherwise.
I'm trying to convey to you what I understood from that thread. I apologize if I've gotten it wrong.
The pictures show several different A320 instrument setups. I see no artificial horizon instruments, but then again I may not be seeing them.
Furthermore, the pilot pointed out that while there is an "emergency instrument" system, called "ISIS", I beleive, it gets its data from the same place, and would also have been offline based on the recorded faults.
Correct, there were no instrument displays telling them they were level. The computers that decide that information disagreed with each other and gave up.
If you aren't a jet pilot, I would probably stop suggesting how it should have worked. Your suggestion to apply 5% more throttle could have destroyed the aircraft.
One thing I learned from this thread is the "Coffin Corner". Flights are operated very near the intersection of their absolute altitude and their absolute vmax.
This puts them in bad shape -- if they go faster, they exceed the design speed of the aircraft. This can cause things like mach tuck and cause the control surfaces to stop responding correctly. Nobody wants a plane that becomes aerodynamically unstable AND doesn't respond to controls.
If the overspeed is excessive of course the aircraft fails structurally.
If they go too slow, obviously they stall.
For a loaded Airbus operating at say FL350 and mach.8, there may only be a 30 knot range of permissible airspeeds. The auto throttles ("cruise control") will attempt to maintain a set speed within that range. THe upper and lower bounds are constantly changing based on atmospheric and flight parameters..
Note that its not as easy as hitting the gas or the brakes -- aircraft attitude greatly impacts speed, as does its altitude.
The planes fly high because it saves gas, its quiet, and its fast. But there isn't a big margin for error up there.
So without having ANY idea how fast you're going, where you're pointed, or what your altitude is, its grossly irresponsible to just apply more throttle.
The only safe course of action is to try to get to lower atltitude somehow without overspeeding the aircraft. But again, how do you do that if you don't know how high you are, where you're pointing, or how fast you're going?
It's basically bullshit to blame the pilots for what happened here.
Read the thread, where the pilot describes, based on the stored faults, which instruments and displays are now offline / not showing what they're supposed to.
The pilots had NO idea of attitude or speed. Even if there were systems onboard that were accurately capturing that data, the crew were not seeing it.
To me, that does seem like a serious fault.
If the pilots had been in day time conditions, and stayed within the (now, non-range limited) ranges of the control surfaces, they'd have been fine.
It's randomly on a car forum, but its worth a read. Some guys that know what they're talking about talk about what they think happened. They also include pics of various airbus cockpits for reference.
- the pilots flew into a thunderstorm - they were 100% blind, relying entirely on the glass-screen instruments - once all 3 pitots froze, the redundant computers started disagreeing and then finally agreed that things were ugly
the effect in the cockpit is that a serious of cascading failures were unfolding, likely overwhelming the pilots.
additionally, there would be NO functional indicators for alt, speed, horizon, etc. Once the computers have faulted, they no longer share that information.
Also, as the computers degrade authority, in an Airbus the pilots get MORE control of the aircraft. This means that controls move through larger ranges.
As flight control reverts to failsafe mode, the controls in the cockpit do not "auto-zero". And the forcefeedback goes off line.
Effectively, the pilots are 100% blind, and the inputs they make have no feedback whatsoever. They cannot even tell if they have _stopped trying_ to turn.
Imagine being blindfolded. Your job is to put the end of a 4 ft long stick inside of a 1" circular hole in the floor. Except the stick is a peice of yarn.
That's what their instruments and control apparatus were like.
Now imagine that everything is beeping at you and you are in a plane in a thunderstorm, over the ocean, at night, and everything outside is total blackness.
I think you have some nice points but I think there is another angle to look at this.
It seems like buggy hardware continues to get made, and i know for a fact that I've bought motherboards from newegg that had component and design errors. I was SOL.
I'm not a super gamer, i don't want to pay the final 90% of cost for the last 10% of performance.
I'd much rather go to "openboards.com (A partner of openboards.org)" and order the latest reference MB design. I also don't mind paying a few bucks more than i would for the newegg special; I understand that for a very long time, an open competitor wouldn't have the parts and procurement volumes involved.
I'd like to save on the IP costs, get a higher quality product, that performs a bit worse, and pay a bit more. The fact of the matter is, my time is important to me and having a known quantity of sufficient reliability matters.
My experience has been that the after-sale support of F/OSS is better than of $Random Foreign Motherboard Maker
The commoditization of the motherboard means that an open board design could make inroads. And there are customers like me who will trade more dollars for higher reliability/quality, but who aren't equipped to understand those price/quality tradeoffs when looking at the existing products.
In the maker community for hardware, each part of the problem is already broken into separate companies. Group A figures out which existing ASICs are of sufficient quality and cost, and where there are gaps, produces new designs. Group B develops board layouts. Company C prints up boards, in small batches. Group D is any list of companies who will solder the components identified by A and B into the boards made by C and sell the whole thing as retail units.
Group E works with group A and B to ensure that the software stack on that hardware is just magnificent. Group F comes along and makes sure that there are drivers for no-Linux OSes. Perhaps Group F even figures it what it takes to get MS to sign the drivers so that they "just work" and you can run Windows on open hardware (irony of ironies..)
This model of distributed responsibility and an open design is similar to how "megasquirt" works, and it seems to be highly successful.
I suspect we've all used boards that have power problems, onboard ethernet problems, ram problems, BIOS problems, etc etc. I wish I could pay $90 for a board that has the basic features I want for the current generation of stuff, and have it just work.
I think this market is especially interesting the higher up the scale you go. A big problem i have dropping big bucks on x86 "server" equipment is that the products are low volume and don't necessarily have community support that I've come to expect.
I think I'd much rather drop big money to buy a dual or quad socket board with 16 ram slots if i knew that 40% of kernel developers were using the same board, and that getting useful support from Dell/HP/Whomever was not part of the equation..
We've seen this start at the software end -- first the compiler, tools, then the OS, now LinuxBIOS... we're moving towards the hardware end of things.
All of the candidates espouse a view that is a "balance" between you being a free person and the federal government getting to break into your home and murder you.
But that's not the kind of balance I want. I'd rather that I was considered "all the way" a free person, and that under no circumstances whatsoever could the government break into my home.
I'm all too aware of my minority status ideologically:)
I don't see why being "near the middle" is a good thing. Nobody would commend a man for his middle-of-the-road views on honesty, or his temperate stance whether or not it is moral to rape women.
I've not explicitly stated my principles but they are pretty standard fair for libertarian/mincarchist/objectivists. Now I must wrestle with the consequences of those principles.
There are a lot of things that I don't personally like and wish other people wouldn't do. But I'm not very enthusiastic about threatening them to get them to stop.
When you understand that all government is backed by the credible threat of violence, it becomes hard to get enthusastic about more laws and regulations.
Yeah, I don't like that there are racist business owners. But when I ask, "Would I _shoot_ a guy over that?", the answer is "not really".
You take for granted that I do not object to them. I don't state that.
The "right" to vote is not universal, nor should it be; as such it's hard to claim that it is a right.
As we've unfortuneately seen throughout history (and recently), the "right" to a jury trial is also not really a "right", but something we occasinoally do for people.
Finally, Rand Paul and I share exactly the same view of the Civil Rights Act -- that it was primarily needed to correct evils committed by GOVERNMENT. However, it contained 2 titles that pertained to _private actors_, regarding service and employment.
Those two titles (2 and 9, iirc) are a violation of the concience of private actors. Bigots, to be sure. But a violation none the less.
In my view, I would rather that a business have a public and open policy of not serving me (or blacks), and a public and open policy of not hiring "my type" (or blacks).
Then I and my like minded friends could knowingly avoid such a business, and we could see to it that it is run out of business due to consumer sentiment and superior competition from less bigoted businesses.
Of course, this requires that the local government not ALSO be bigoted. After all, one must be able to get permits, and so the permitting board may not be bigoted. One must be able to get land zoned for resturants, and so the zoning board must not be bigoted. One must be able to get police protection from the Klan, and so the cops and the judges must not be bigoted. One must be allowed to retain a health inspectors certificate, and so the health certiification board must not allow bigotry.
The unfortuneate problem is that a man cannot so much as a take a shit in his own home without the consent of a government entity. And so the CRA was necessary to purge bigotry from the offices of local GOVERNMENT. It is right and just that all individuals have equal standing before the _law_.
However, it is NOT the business of government to decide which actors get special protection from bigotry by private actors. This can never be effective at changing public opinion, at changing hearts and minds. This lets foolish bitterness hide beneath the surface amongst the cock roaches that harbor it. And it fosters resentment from people who are truly not bigots but have been found on the wrong side of the law, and it fosters resentment amongst those who _Are_ the victim of bigtroy but are not yet considered a protected class.
And so black people continue to have their food spit in, and they get poor service, and they are abused in every way which doesn't strictly run afoul of the written law, because they (and eveyrone else) have no reason to beleive or see that a particular business will be operated by bigoted folks.
The titles of CRA64 that apply to private actors are both ineffective and furthermore violate the right to be an asshole that individuals must retain. It creates an artificial barrier between a man's mind, his home, and his business, one that i posit should not exist.
I understand taht not everyone finds this line of argument convincing, and that is fine. There are people who will defend the CRA64 provisions both in principled terms ("nobody should be ALLOWED to be bigoted!") and in consequentialist terms ("if it fixed the problem it was a good law").
I, as much as possible, view the law as an evil instrument to be used as little as is humanly possible. The primary time spent crafting government should be on fixing government, not fixing people or society.
The problem with positive rights is that they require the threat of violence.
The other side of the UDHR coin is that it requires mobs with guns to COMPEL some doctor somewhere to provide healthcare, to COMPEL some homebuilder to build an "affordable" house, and to COMPEL some "employer" somewhere to provide a "Decent job".. maybe at a "living wage".
The reason positive rights are evil is because they rest on the threat of back-end violence. You can grant everyone the "right" of healthcare as long as you suppress the right of doctors to stop going to work.
The negative liberties at issue are things that exist when you are a man alone on an island. Nobody grants them to you. You have them. You have the right to say what you like, to claim and retain property, etc.
The US government was founded largely on the idea that you should retain these rights irrespective of how many persons become your neighbors.
The jury trial isn't a "right" in the same sense as the previously mentioned ones because it is irrelevant when a man lives in isolation.
I don't have the wording infront of me, it would be better to have said that a man shall not be denied a jury trial.
The UDHR is fundamentally incompatible with the ideas the US was founded on. Of course, the US has mostly rubbed those ideas out, both in practice and ideology.
I'd bother to post a rebuttal to this that had some kind of insightful analysis of what anonymous is, why "it" does what it does, and what it means, and what it's point is..
but then "they" would make fun of me and troll me, because, after all, its all for the lulz, and i sound like a moralfag.
So i'll give you a really short version of how i understand things to be.
there are people out there -- authorities in the "old world", the meat-space world.. who want very much to project their authority onto the internet.
the internet is not a hobby, not a business, not a "thing", but which is, for many people of my generation, and most people younger than me.. an internet that has certain essential qualities, like being free (as in freedom), which have infused themselves into the identities of who we are.
And so when self-righteous dipshits (like Co$, or HBGary, or the RIAA, or whomever) want to go ruin "our" internet, and when there are a group of non-affiliated people who share, at least on one general topic, the same ideology of what the internet should be and who it should be for... and when these same people can communicate with each other easily, and when they have a broad and deep toolbox of "capabilities",
well, why should they listen to the dipshits?
They OWN your websites, your identities, "your" internet. It's all theirs, if they feel like being assertive. And when you intrude on their electronic domain, after mocking you, they will happily intrude back into YOUR safe place -- the physical world -- where you _think_ your authority matters and holds water.
It doesn't.
You are naked, and you are powerless. You are guilty of taking yourself too seriously.
Sorry for my underspecified use of "normal" -- I understand how that could be setting off alarms for a wide variety of people, and in a post where I talk about how politicians create divisiveness, my intent was not to create more divisiveness.
The meaning of "normal" i was trying to convey is maybe something along the lines of "entities who feel that the government is a tool to benefit them at the expense of others"
No specific notion of race, gender, religion, or any other such individual matter is implied.
Furthermore, this notion of more and more people "wanting their share" and fabricating rationales for why this is just applies to businesses at least as much as individuals.
If it makes the rest of my original post easier to agree with, assume that i meant no harm in what I said, and that it was an unfinished thought.
Can we now dispense with the myth of the 2-party system?
There is one party -- the party of you're going to get fucked and you're going to like it.
The two faces of this party manufacture differences to keep Americans at each other's throats. There probably are ideological differences somewhere buried, and they certainly talk differently during campaign time.
But they are remarkably similar in how they actually behave: scratch the backs that scratched them, put the screws to the companies that don't play ball, put the screws to the vanishingly small subset of "normal Americans", who don't have some other group-identifying prefix or suffix.
Add to that, cooperate with or live in ignorance of the fact that the money printers and bankers really run the show, and don't forget: expand federal government power and run ripshod over the core principles and civil liberties that set this nation apart at its founding (who reads history, anyway?) , and finally, almost all politicians of any flavor agree that the answer to every problem is to say YES to EVERYBODY, thereby having the best shot of re-election.
I didn't and don't like Obama's professed worldview: I think he's much too redistributionist for my tastes, but then, I'm more individualist than Ayn Rand. But enough about me.
Obama was supposed to FIX at least _some_ of the shit that GWB did badly. He was supposed to draw down troop deployments, he was supposed to get rid of our "parallel" justice system where torture and kidnapping and indefinite incarceration and no trials are all fine and dandy. He was supposed to give back some of the 4th amendment.
He has done none of those things, and infact, on all fronts, has made them worse.
Nearly everything that GWB was doign wrong, Obama has continued or made worse.
I hope the Obama administration thus far has been a wake-up call for people who were looking for 180 degree turn.
That might be required, and I could envision a scenario where taxes are raised that I could even support. And although I'm not a 250k-er, most tax changes do end up affecting me, especially changes to capital gains. So I've got some "skin in the game", tax wise. More so than many people, we'll say.
But I beleive you could tax the current tax-paying Americans at _100%_ and we still wouldn't be out of the mess we're in. _That's_ how bad it has gotten.
_Spending_ is the problem. It has always been the problem. "Both" political parties are responsible, both have done badly. And even though I grew up in a home that worshipped St. Rondaldus Maximus Reagan, the fact of the matter is that even he, who campaigned so strongly on the evils of government, blew out the defecit, did NOT axe the programs he was supposed to, and started the War On Some Drugs. Reagan, who _campaigned_ on eliminating the DOE and DOE (energy and education), did neither, and instead ballooned spending.
So we're screwed now unless we make agressive, brutal, violent spending cuts. We still may need to raise taxes even _After_ we do that. But our choices are literally, make the cuts now, and have some say in how our society unwinds and our safety net erodes, or we do nothing and watch it come apart overnight, Egypt style.
The problems we face are manifold: we have spent all of the time since the collapse of Bretton Woods exporting our inflation to other nations. The other nations have either gotten sick of it or collapsed themselves. There is serious talk about retiring the USD as the world's reserve currency, and about pricing OPEC oil in something other than USD.
Once the price in USD of crude oil skyrockets, because nobody feels the need to acquire USD to buy it, and the various oil exporters don't care to have any more worthless USDs at all, we're going to get hit by a few things.
1) the international demand for USD will plummet 2) we will be unable to buy energy at anything like current prices, and access to oil is the underpinning of our entire economy. It is built into the price of every transaction we do
The result is that the inflation we've been hiding and exporting will hit very hard and very fast, and suddenly it will be nealry impossible for business-as-usual to be business-as-usual. The optimized supply chains we have for putting food into urban centers presupposes that the trucks have fuel to get them there, and there is money to pay the drivers, and that there was cheap oil and natural gas to fertilize the crops and run the machinery our modern high-input farming requires. And all of the things I've mentioned (and not mentioned) have the greasy fingers of the federal government in there, taking money here, spending it there, trying to manipulate things subtly. That wil also stop, abruptly.
The shock to our national system will take some time to sort out. While store shelves sit empty. And the only power government will have will be to make things worse, less efficient, and to jail or murder people.
This is what awaits us if we do not shore up the dollar. If your politician is talking about anything else than engineering the safest possible crash-landing for the US economy, they are a buffoon, they are part of the problem, and they (and you) won't have time to feel foolish when the thing just lawn-darts into the annals of failed civilizations.
Incidentally, Rand Paul's proposal to cut $500B includes around $50B in defense cuts.
And he says its a _Starting point_. And today at CPAC he told the assembled throng of conservatives that they MUST be prepared to cut defense, and to stop being the world's policemen.
Ron and Rand Paul are hardly republicans. But they're holding elected office and they're willing to cut any and all comers. Defense included.
Show me a plan that balances the budget THIS YEAR. With spending cuts everywhere. Show me that plan, and then mention how some tax increases here and there can help shore up the loose ends, and make us revenue positive, or help us service debt faster than we can create it, and I'll listen.
But SPENDING is the problem. And everyone is guilty.
2) Why shouldn't the owner of a computer OR a phone open it up and mess with it if they'd prefer to?
3) The distinction between "computer" and "phone" is rapidly vanishing. The hardware of todays' phones shames the hardware of yesterday's computers. The software is converging as well.
One would hope that the openness and large ecosystem of the PC would influence the phone. Sadly, it seems that the closedness and nickle-and-dime-them habits of the phone world will come to the PC instead.
Apple has perfected the "closed world" model of computing.
IME, and I'd be happy to be wrong, the only modern phone that isn't 100% vendor/carrier lockin bullshit is the Nexus, and only if you bought it right from Google.
If putting my app on MY device is harder than copying a.jar file over USB, it's not my device, it's bullshit.
What Jim is saying is that TCP flows try to train themselves to the dynamically available bandwidth, such that there is a minimum of dropped packets, retransmits, etc.
But in order for TCP to do this, packets must be dropped _fast_.
When TCP was designed, the assumptions about the price of ram (and thus, the amount of onboard memory in all the devices in the virtual circuit) were different -- namely, buffers were going to be smaller, fill up faster, and send "i'm full" messages backwards much sooner.
What the experimentation has determined is that many network devices will buffer 1 megabyte or MORE of traffic before finally dropping something and telling the tcp originator to slow down. And yet with a 1 meg buffer and a rate of 1 megabyte per second.. it will take 1 second simply to drain the buffer.
The pervasive presence of large buffers all along the tcp vc, and the non-speified or tail-drop drop behavior of these large queues means that tcp's ability to rate limit is effectively nullified, and in situations where the link is highly utilized, many degenerate behaviors occur, such that the overall link has extremely high latency, and that bulk traffic will cause interesting traffic to be randomly dropped.
Personally, I used pf/altQ on openBSD to try and manage this somewhat.. but its a dicey business.
It's worth pointing out that Xbox 360 is a completely different CPU and GPU architecture than the original XBOX, and MS developed and acquired the people and technology required to make that 100% software emulation kick ass.
And unlike PS1, PS2, and PS3 back compat, X360 compatability is pretty damn good, and hasn't been dropped from any version of the 360. And again, it's 100% software. (PS back compat was always done with onboard hardware, which is why Sony always cuts it to save on manufacturing costs mid-cycle)
The original xbox was roughly a celeron 733. The x360 is a 6-core PowerPC derivative. The XGPU was Nvidia, somewhere around a GF3 (iirc); the X360 unit is a proprietary design with, iirc, help from ATI. Yet somehow games, which are highly perf sensitive, seem to emulate quite nicely.
Visual studio is a mixed mode app. The basic shell and environment is native code. But there are many managed components that are loaded into it. Previous to VS2010, the code editing experience was native, but I beleive it is now WPF based and as such is also managed.
A tool for developers as you might expect is highly componentized and extensible, and plugins can be written in either native or managed code.
VS has had cross compiling features for at least 10 years, and that's the number i picked because that's how long i've looked at it. VC 6.0 had th Windows CE toolkit, used for authoring windows CE apps for all the procs that CE supported. Modern VS installs ask you if you want to install the Itanium cross-compilation tools. When you install the Windows phone 7 SDK you get a different cross compiler and binary emulation environment.
Cross compiling, multi-targeting, etc is nothing new for MS. They've been supporting more architectures in more products than Apple, Google, or anyone else for years.
I read it as being a specifically frustrating example that was indicative of the complete lack of quality focus and sound software engineering governing the project.
And apparently the relevant people in his organization either don't know or don't care that this is the case.
So assaulting them with a bunch of technology, process, or methodolgy (nUnit!, Scrum!, Test First!) is a non-starter.
Testing is an unbounded problem. You can always do more of it, and the things that can be easily unit tested are usually the least interesting and valuable things to test. Professional testers tend to like to plan out the overview of the testing problem space and then cut it up into chunks according to some value-per-time function that the people writing their paychecks agree with.
You don't say this explicitly, but most people in the thread seem to be assuming it:
why is there a focus on automated tests here?
I would contend that step 1 is writing a document. It describes the test scenarios you think are important, why you think they are important, and their relative importance w.r.t to other scenarios.
Shop the document around -- include it and update it when the cost/benefit excercize is done.
Eventually, you will arrive at a point in time where people begrudgingly agree that "we should check those things before [blah]". Once there is buyoff from management that it is indeed important to check some/all of the things in your document(s), automating as many of them as possible as cheaply as possible follows quickly behind. Nobody wants to do repetitive testing by hand.
It's still, however, a good idea to have a breadth-first search of the product's functionality that is done by a real human being.. a vague script fit for human consumption.
I say this because automated tests can only notice what they've been explicitly coded to look for. You can certainly make very advanced automated tests -- including fuzzy bitmap comparison to try ainf find "out of place" things, but the human mind seems to work in just the opposite way: it notices what it wasn't told to look for. That's a fantastic and amazing quality for something tasked with the job of looking for defects in complicated software.
I wonder if Apple had been planning on throwing the magsafe power connector on some future iPhone.
Depending on how the EU decree was worded, presumably they'd be disbarred from doing so now.
Does this law sunset? When mini-USB is as much of a relic as DIN-5 keyboard connectors, or when 95% of phones use inductive charging mats, will EU-market phones still have these silly ports on them?
(incidentally, I hate any non-USB interface on a phone. The EU directive certainly appeals to my current shortsighted desires. But I'm not going to pretend that my desires are anything other than shortsighted -- what we can see easily is that this will stop some of the short term dumbness around proprietary chargers. What we don't see is the other good things some of us will want that this is going to impede or prevent. This is the universal truism of government -- we like what we can see in front of us; we rarely consider the disparate and longer term implications of policy)
Suppose for the sake of argument that I didn't think Beck was a self-serving blowhard asshole (Incidentally, I do); what difference would who I like or dislike make?
I don't see that you've even _started_ to try and reason with me at all, much less my "dogma", much less to the extent that you should tire of it already.
Do you get this bent out of shape everytime someone disagrees with you? Is there a newsletter of yours that is prerequisite material I should have already covered so you don't have to bother to support or justify any of your spew?
Do you actually disagree with my original claims? #1: IP transit is the _most_ competitive home "service" most people receive #2: most of the technology used in last-mile IP delivery did not exist even 25 years ago #3: it is possible for most people to get the right mix of speed and features -- at a price #4: the fact that there are so many options at so many price points suggests that there IS a market at play here, government collusion notwithstanding
Again -- if amazing broadband is so cheap to provide, why aren't you providing it? It's a serious question. I figure with a few days of reading, I could brush up on a few things and be running a multi-homed ISP. I could make a few arrangements with area businesses and home owners to put p2p optical ethernet links between them and me, and then cover their sites with wifi or wimax. I could get say 100 subscribers pretty easily, and we'll just ignore the startup costs since no company ever has to turn a profit these days.
Now I've got 100 subscribers * $xx revenue stream per month. What are my costs? Upstream and electricity, right? Support costs are zero -- I've replaced all the humans in my operation with tiny shell scripts (as the saying goes...)
This is just my dumb slashdot idea for a small broadband provider. I could do it in a month. I'm sure your idea is better. Why aren't you making an ass-ton of money on it? If there is so much evil corporate greed out there sucking money from people like a vampire, why aren't you in on the take? Better yet, why aren't you doing the ethical thing and offering better service for less money and _still_ raking in the profits?
My very first job was to re-write the C++ billing system for a national dial-up ISP. So I have at least one anecdotal data point about life running consumer IP transit, and how you make money...
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My information suggests that the sensors feeding the black box either cannot or were not made available to the primary flight instrument computers, astonishingly enough.
Given the amount of system isolation in aircraft this isn't entirely impossible to beleive. If you tie part B into part A's wiring in any way, you have to do more testing/verification than you would otherwise.
I'm trying to convey to you what I understood from that thread. I apologize if I've gotten it wrong.
The pictures show several different A320 instrument setups. I see no artificial horizon instruments, but then again I may not be seeing them.
Furthermore, the pilot pointed out that while there is an "emergency instrument" system, called "ISIS", I beleive, it gets its data from the same place, and would also have been offline based on the recorded faults.
Correct, there were no instrument displays telling them they were level. The computers that decide that information disagreed with each other and gave up.
If you aren't a jet pilot, I would probably stop suggesting how it should have worked. Your suggestion to apply 5% more throttle could have destroyed the aircraft.
One thing I learned from this thread is the "Coffin Corner". Flights are operated very near the intersection of their absolute altitude and their absolute vmax.
This puts them in bad shape -- if they go faster, they exceed the design speed of the aircraft. This can cause things like mach tuck and cause the control surfaces to stop responding correctly. Nobody wants a plane that becomes aerodynamically unstable AND doesn't respond to controls.
If the overspeed is excessive of course the aircraft fails structurally.
If they go too slow, obviously they stall.
For a loaded Airbus operating at say FL350 and mach .8, there may only be a 30 knot range of permissible airspeeds. The auto throttles ("cruise control") will attempt to maintain a set speed within that range. THe upper and lower bounds are constantly changing based on atmospheric and flight parameters..
Note that its not as easy as hitting the gas or the brakes -- aircraft attitude greatly impacts speed, as does its altitude.
The planes fly high because it saves gas, its quiet, and its fast. But there isn't a big margin for error up there.
So without having ANY idea how fast you're going, where you're pointed, or what your altitude is, its grossly irresponsible to just apply more throttle.
The only safe course of action is to try to get to lower atltitude somehow without overspeeding the aircraft. But again, how do you do that if you don't know how high you are, where you're pointing, or how fast you're going?
It's basically bullshit to blame the pilots for what happened here.
Read the thread, where the pilot describes, based on the stored faults, which instruments and displays are now offline / not showing what they're supposed to.
The pilots had NO idea of attitude or speed. Even if there were systems onboard that were accurately capturing that data, the crew were not seeing it.
To me, that does seem like a serious fault.
If the pilots had been in day time conditions, and stayed within the (now, non-range limited) ranges of the control surfaces, they'd have been fine.
It's randomly on a car forum, but its worth a read. Some guys that know what they're talking about talk about what they think happened. They also include pics of various airbus cockpits for reference.
http://www.mye28.com/viewtopic.php?t=64381&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=25
Here's the basic story, as I understand it:
- the pilots flew into a thunderstorm
- they were 100% blind, relying entirely on the glass-screen instruments
- once all 3 pitots froze, the redundant computers started disagreeing and then finally agreed that things were ugly
the effect in the cockpit is that a serious of cascading failures were unfolding, likely overwhelming the pilots.
additionally, there would be NO functional indicators for alt, speed, horizon, etc. Once the computers have faulted, they no longer share that information.
Also, as the computers degrade authority, in an Airbus the pilots get MORE control of the aircraft. This means that controls move through larger ranges.
As flight control reverts to failsafe mode, the controls in the cockpit do not "auto-zero". And the forcefeedback goes off line.
Effectively, the pilots are 100% blind, and the inputs they make have no feedback whatsoever. They cannot even tell if they have _stopped trying_ to turn.
Imagine being blindfolded. Your job is to put the end of a 4 ft long stick inside of a 1" circular hole in the floor. Except the stick is a peice of yarn.
That's what their instruments and control apparatus were like.
Now imagine that everything is beeping at you and you are in a plane in a thunderstorm, over the ocean, at night, and everything outside is total blackness.
You're fucked. Thoroughly and completely fucked.
I think you have some nice points but I think there is another angle to look at this.
It seems like buggy hardware continues to get made, and i know for a fact that I've bought motherboards from newegg that had component and design errors. I was SOL.
I'm not a super gamer, i don't want to pay the final 90% of cost for the last 10% of performance.
I'd much rather go to "openboards.com (A partner of openboards.org)" and order the latest reference MB design. I also don't mind paying a few bucks more than i would for the newegg special; I understand that for a very long time, an open competitor wouldn't have the parts and procurement volumes involved.
I'd like to save on the IP costs, get a higher quality product, that performs a bit worse, and pay a bit more. The fact of the matter is, my time is important to me and having a known quantity of sufficient reliability matters.
My experience has been that the after-sale support of F/OSS is better than of $Random Foreign Motherboard Maker
The commoditization of the motherboard means that an open board design could make inroads. And there are customers like me who will trade more dollars for higher reliability/quality, but who aren't equipped to understand those price/quality tradeoffs when looking at the existing products.
In the maker community for hardware, each part of the problem is already broken into separate companies. Group A figures out which existing ASICs are of sufficient quality and cost, and where there are gaps, produces new designs. Group B develops board layouts. Company C prints up boards, in small batches. Group D is any list of companies who will solder the components identified by A and B into the boards made by C and sell the whole thing as
retail units.
Group E works with group A and B to ensure that the software stack on that hardware is just magnificent. Group F comes along and makes sure that there are drivers for no-Linux OSes. Perhaps Group F even figures it what it takes to get MS to sign the drivers so that they "just work" and you can run Windows on open hardware (irony of ironies..)
This model of distributed responsibility and an open design is similar to how "megasquirt" works, and it seems to be highly successful.
I suspect we've all used boards that have power problems, onboard ethernet problems, ram problems, BIOS problems, etc etc. I wish I could pay $90 for a board that has the basic features I want for the current generation of stuff, and have it just work.
I think this market is especially interesting the higher up the scale you go. A big problem i have dropping big bucks on x86 "server" equipment is that the products are low volume and don't necessarily have community support that I've come to expect.
I think I'd much rather drop big money to buy a dual or quad socket board with 16 ram slots if i knew that 40% of kernel developers were using the same board, and that getting useful support from Dell/HP/Whomever was not part of the equation..
We've seen this start at the software end -- first the compiler, tools, then the OS, now LinuxBIOS... we're moving towards the hardware end of things.
All of the candidates espouse a view that is a "balance" between you being a free person and the federal government getting to break into your home and murder you.
But that's not the kind of balance I want. I'd rather that I was considered "all the way" a free person, and that under no circumstances whatsoever could the government break into my home.
Who should I vote for?
(PS: voting is aggression)
Is this insightful because _everyone_ thinks that they're the ones with the reasonable views, and its the _other_ guys who are polarizing?
I'm all too aware of my minority status ideologically :)
I don't see why being "near the middle" is a good thing. Nobody would commend a man for his middle-of-the-road views on honesty, or his temperate stance whether or not it is moral to rape women.
I've not explicitly stated my principles but they are pretty standard fair for libertarian/mincarchist/objectivists. Now I must wrestle with the consequences of those principles.
There are a lot of things that I don't personally like and wish other people wouldn't do. But I'm not very enthusiastic about threatening them to get them to stop.
When you understand that all government is backed by the credible threat of violence, it becomes hard to get enthusastic about more laws and regulations.
Yeah, I don't like that there are racist business owners. But when I ask, "Would I _shoot_ a guy over that?", the answer is "not really".
You take for granted that I do not object to them. I don't state that.
The "right" to vote is not universal, nor should it be; as such it's hard to claim that it is a right.
As we've unfortuneately seen throughout history (and recently), the "right" to a jury trial is also not really a "right", but something we occasinoally do for people.
Finally, Rand Paul and I share exactly the same view of the Civil Rights Act -- that it was primarily needed to correct evils committed by GOVERNMENT. However, it contained 2 titles that pertained to _private actors_, regarding service and employment.
Those two titles (2 and 9, iirc) are a violation of the concience of private actors. Bigots, to be sure. But a violation none the less.
In my view, I would rather that a business have a public and open policy of not serving me (or blacks), and a public and open policy of not hiring "my type" (or blacks).
Then I and my like minded friends could knowingly avoid such a business, and we could see to it that it is run out of business due to consumer sentiment and superior competition from less bigoted businesses.
Of course, this requires that the local government not ALSO be bigoted. After all, one must be able to get permits, and so the permitting board may not be bigoted. One must be able to get land zoned for resturants, and so the zoning board must not be bigoted. One must be able to get police protection from the Klan, and so the cops and the judges must not be bigoted. One must be allowed to retain a health inspectors certificate, and so the health certiification board must not allow bigotry.
The unfortuneate problem is that a man cannot so much as a take a shit in his own home without the consent of a government entity. And so the CRA was necessary to purge bigotry from the offices of local GOVERNMENT. It is right and just that all individuals have equal standing before the _law_.
However, it is NOT the business of government to decide which actors get special protection from bigotry by private actors. This can never be effective at changing public opinion, at changing hearts and minds. This lets foolish bitterness hide beneath the surface amongst the cock roaches that harbor it. And it fosters resentment from people who are truly not bigots but have been found on the wrong side of the law, and it fosters resentment amongst those who _Are_ the victim of bigtroy but are not yet considered a protected class.
And so black people continue to have their food spit in, and they get poor service, and they are abused in every way which doesn't strictly run afoul of the written law, because they (and eveyrone else) have no reason to beleive or see that a particular business will be operated by bigoted folks.
The titles of CRA64 that apply to private actors are both ineffective and furthermore violate the right to be an asshole that individuals must retain. It creates an artificial barrier between a man's mind, his home, and his business, one that i posit should not exist.
I understand taht not everyone finds this line of argument convincing, and that is fine. There are people who will defend the CRA64 provisions both in principled terms ("nobody should be ALLOWED to be bigoted!") and in consequentialist terms ("if it fixed the problem it was a good law").
I, as much as possible, view the law as an evil instrument to be used as little as is humanly possible. The primary time spent crafting government should be on fixing government, not fixing people or society.
The problem with positive rights is that they require the threat of violence.
The other side of the UDHR coin is that it requires mobs with guns to COMPEL some doctor somewhere to provide healthcare, to COMPEL some homebuilder to build an "affordable" house, and to COMPEL some "employer" somewhere to provide a "Decent job".. maybe at a "living wage".
The reason positive rights are evil is because they rest on the threat of back-end violence. You can grant everyone the "right" of healthcare as long as you suppress the right of doctors to stop going to work.
The negative liberties at issue are things that exist when you are a man alone on an island. Nobody grants them to you. You have them. You have the right to say what you like, to claim and retain property, etc.
The US government was founded largely on the idea that you should retain these rights irrespective of how many persons become your neighbors.
The jury trial isn't a "right" in the same sense as the previously mentioned ones because it is irrelevant when a man lives in isolation.
I don't have the wording infront of me, it would be better to have said that a man shall not be denied a jury trial.
The UDHR is fundamentally incompatible with the ideas the US was founded on. Of course, the US has mostly rubbed those ideas out, both in practice and ideology.
http://wimp.com/thegovernment
Watch it 10 times if that's what it takes.
I'd bother to post a rebuttal to this that had some kind of insightful analysis of what anonymous is, why "it" does what it does, and what it means, and what it's point is..
but then "they" would make fun of me and troll me, because, after all, its all for the lulz, and i sound like a moralfag.
So i'll give you a really short version of how i understand things to be.
there are people out there -- authorities in the "old world", the meat-space world.. who want very much to project their authority onto the internet.
the internet is not a hobby, not a business, not a "thing", but which is, for many people of my generation, and most people younger than me.. an internet that has certain essential qualities, like being free (as in freedom), which have infused themselves into the identities of who we are.
And so when self-righteous dipshits (like Co$, or HBGary, or the RIAA, or whomever) want to go ruin "our" internet, and when there are a group of non-affiliated people who share, at least on one general topic, the same ideology of what the internet should be and who it should be for... and when these same people can communicate with each other easily, and when they have a broad and deep toolbox of "capabilities",
well, why should they listen to the dipshits?
They OWN your websites, your identities, "your" internet. It's all theirs, if they feel like being assertive. And when you intrude on their electronic domain, after mocking you, they will happily intrude back into YOUR safe place -- the physical world -- where you _think_ your authority matters and holds water.
It doesn't.
You are naked, and you are powerless. You are guilty of taking yourself too seriously.
Sorry for my underspecified use of "normal" -- I understand how that could be setting off alarms
for a wide variety of people, and in a post where I talk about how politicians create divisiveness, my intent was not to create more divisiveness.
The meaning of "normal" i was trying to convey is maybe something along the lines of "entities who feel that the government is a tool to benefit them at the expense of others"
No specific notion of race, gender, religion, or any other such individual matter is implied.
Furthermore, this notion of more and more people "wanting their share" and fabricating rationales for why this is just applies to businesses at least as much as individuals.
If it makes the rest of my original post easier to agree with, assume that i meant no harm in what I said, and that it was an unfinished thought.
Can we now dispense with the myth of the 2-party system?
There is one party -- the party of you're going to get fucked and you're going to like it.
The two faces of this party manufacture differences to keep Americans at each other's throats. There probably are ideological differences somewhere buried, and they certainly talk differently during campaign time.
But they are remarkably similar in how they actually behave: scratch the backs that scratched them, put the screws to the companies that don't play ball, put the screws to the vanishingly small subset of "normal Americans", who don't have some other group-identifying prefix or suffix.
Add to that, cooperate with or live in ignorance of the fact that the money printers and bankers really run the show, and don't forget: expand federal government power and run ripshod over the core principles and civil liberties that set this nation apart at its founding (who reads history, anyway?) , and finally, almost all politicians of any flavor agree that the answer to every problem is to say YES to EVERYBODY, thereby having the best shot of re-election.
I didn't and don't like Obama's professed worldview: I think he's much too redistributionist for my tastes, but then, I'm more individualist than Ayn Rand. But enough about me.
Obama was supposed to FIX at least _some_ of the shit that GWB did badly. He was supposed to draw down troop deployments, he was supposed to get rid of our "parallel" justice system where torture and kidnapping and indefinite incarceration and no trials are all fine and dandy. He was supposed to give back some of the 4th amendment.
He has done none of those things, and infact, on all fronts, has made them worse.
Nearly everything that GWB was doign wrong, Obama has continued or made worse.
I hope the Obama administration thus far has been a wake-up call for people who were looking for 180 degree turn.
That might be required, and I could envision a scenario where taxes are raised that I could even support. And although I'm not a 250k-er, most tax changes do end up affecting me, especially changes to capital gains. So I've got some "skin in the game", tax wise. More so than many people, we'll say.
But I beleive you could tax the current tax-paying Americans at _100%_ and we still wouldn't be out of the mess we're in. _That's_ how bad it has gotten.
_Spending_ is the problem. It has always been the problem. "Both" political parties are responsible, both have done badly. And even though I grew up in a home that worshipped St. Rondaldus Maximus Reagan, the fact of the matter is that even he, who campaigned so strongly on the evils of government, blew out the defecit, did NOT axe the programs he was supposed to, and started the War On Some Drugs. Reagan, who _campaigned_ on eliminating the DOE and DOE (energy and education), did neither, and instead ballooned spending.
So we're screwed now unless we make agressive, brutal, violent spending cuts. We still may need to raise taxes even _After_ we do that. But our choices are literally, make the cuts now, and have some say in how our society unwinds and our safety net erodes, or we do nothing and watch it come apart overnight, Egypt style.
The problems we face are manifold: we have spent all of the time since the collapse of Bretton Woods exporting our inflation to other nations. The other nations have either gotten sick of it or collapsed themselves. There is serious talk about retiring the USD as the world's reserve currency, and about pricing OPEC oil in something other than USD.
Once the price in USD of crude oil skyrockets, because nobody feels the need to acquire USD to buy it, and the various oil exporters don't care to have any more worthless USDs at all, we're going to get hit by a few things.
1) the international demand for USD will plummet
2) we will be unable to buy energy at anything like current prices, and access to oil is the underpinning of our entire economy. It is built into the price of every transaction we do
The result is that the inflation we've been hiding and exporting will hit very hard and very fast, and suddenly it will be nealry impossible for business-as-usual to be business-as-usual. The optimized supply chains we have for putting food into urban centers presupposes that the trucks have fuel to get them there, and there is money to pay the drivers, and that there was cheap oil and natural gas to fertilize the crops and run the machinery our modern high-input farming requires. And all of the things I've mentioned (and not mentioned) have the greasy fingers of the federal government in there, taking money here, spending it there, trying to manipulate things subtly. That wil also stop, abruptly.
The shock to our national system will take some time to sort out. While store shelves sit empty. And the only power government will have will be to make things worse, less efficient, and to jail or murder people.
This is what awaits us if we do not shore up the dollar. If your politician is talking about anything else than engineering the safest possible crash-landing for the US economy, they are a buffoon, they are part of the problem, and they (and you) won't have time to feel foolish when the thing just lawn-darts into the annals of failed civilizations.
Incidentally, Rand Paul's proposal to cut $500B includes around $50B in defense cuts.
And he says its a _Starting point_. And today at CPAC he told the assembled throng of conservatives that they MUST be prepared to cut defense, and to stop being the world's policemen.
Ron and Rand Paul are hardly republicans. But they're holding elected office and they're willing to cut any and all comers. Defense included.
Show me a plan that balances the budget THIS YEAR. With spending cuts everywhere. Show me that plan, and then mention how some tax increases here and there can help shore up the loose ends, and make us revenue positive, or help us service debt faster than we can create it, and I'll listen.
But SPENDING is the problem. And everyone is guilty.
What?
1) Why aren't computers for use by everyone?
2) Why shouldn't the owner of a computer OR a phone open it up and mess with it if they'd prefer to?
3) The distinction between "computer" and "phone" is rapidly vanishing. The hardware of todays' phones shames the hardware of yesterday's computers. The software is converging as well.
One would hope that the openness and large ecosystem of the PC would influence the phone. Sadly, it seems that the closedness and nickle-and-dime-them habits of the phone world will come to the PC instead.
Apple has perfected the "closed world" model of computing.
IME, and I'd be happy to be wrong, the only modern phone that isn't 100% vendor/carrier lockin bullshit is the Nexus, and only if you bought it right from Google.
If putting my app on MY device is harder than copying a .jar file over USB, it's not my device, it's bullshit.
What Jim is saying is that TCP flows try to train themselves to the dynamically available bandwidth, such that there is a minimum of dropped packets, retransmits, etc.
But in order for TCP to do this, packets must be dropped _fast_.
When TCP was designed, the assumptions about the price of ram (and thus, the amount of onboard memory in all the devices in the virtual circuit) were different -- namely, buffers were going to be smaller, fill up faster, and send "i'm full" messages backwards much sooner.
What the experimentation has determined is that many network devices will buffer 1 megabyte or MORE of traffic before finally dropping something and telling the tcp originator to slow down. And yet with a 1 meg buffer and a rate of 1 megabyte per second.. it will take 1 second simply to drain the buffer.
The pervasive presence of large buffers all along the tcp vc, and the non-speified or tail-drop drop behavior of these large queues means that tcp's ability to rate limit is effectively nullified, and in situations where the link is highly utilized, many degenerate behaviors occur, such that the overall link has extremely high latency, and that bulk traffic will cause interesting traffic to be randomly dropped.
Personally, I used pf/altQ on openBSD to try and manage this somewhat.. but its a dicey business.
It's worth pointing out that Xbox 360 is a completely different CPU and GPU architecture than the original XBOX, and MS developed and acquired the people and technology required to make that 100% software emulation kick ass.
And unlike PS1, PS2, and PS3 back compat, X360 compatability is pretty damn good, and hasn't been dropped from any version of the 360. And again, it's 100% software. (PS back compat was always done with onboard hardware, which is why Sony always cuts it to save on manufacturing costs mid-cycle)
The original xbox was roughly a celeron 733. The x360 is a 6-core PowerPC derivative. The XGPU was Nvidia, somewhere around a GF3 (iirc); the X360 unit is a proprietary design with, iirc, help from ATI. Yet somehow games, which are highly perf sensitive, seem to emulate quite nicely.
Visual studio is a mixed mode app. The basic shell and environment is native code. But there are many managed components that are loaded into it. Previous to VS2010, the code editing experience was native, but I beleive it is now WPF based and as such is also managed.
A tool for developers as you might expect is highly componentized and extensible, and plugins can be written in either native or managed code.
VS has had cross compiling features for at least 10 years, and that's the number i picked because that's how long i've looked at it. VC 6.0 had th Windows CE toolkit, used for authoring windows CE apps for all the procs that CE supported. Modern VS installs ask you if you want to install the Itanium cross-compilation tools. When you install the Windows phone 7 SDK you get a different cross compiler and binary emulation environment.
Cross compiling, multi-targeting, etc is nothing new for MS. They've been supporting more architectures in more products than Apple, Google, or anyone else for years.
I read it as being a specifically frustrating example that was indicative of the complete lack of quality focus and sound software engineering governing the project.
And apparently the relevant people in his organization either don't know or don't care that this is the case.
So assaulting them with a bunch of technology, process, or methodolgy (nUnit!, Scrum!, Test First!) is a non-starter.
Testing is an unbounded problem. You can always do more of it, and the things that can be easily unit tested are usually the least interesting and valuable things to test. Professional testers tend to like to plan out the overview of the testing problem space and then cut it up into chunks according to some value-per-time function that the people writing their paychecks agree with.
You don't say this explicitly, but most people in the thread seem to be assuming it:
why is there a focus on automated tests here?
I would contend that step 1 is writing a document. It describes the test scenarios you think are important, why you think they are important, and their relative importance w.r.t to other scenarios.
Shop the document around -- include it and update it when the cost/benefit excercize is done.
Eventually, you will arrive at a point in time where people begrudgingly agree that "we should check those things before [blah]". Once there is buyoff from management that it is indeed important to check some/all of the things in your document(s), automating as many of them as possible as cheaply as possible follows quickly behind. Nobody wants to do repetitive testing by hand.
It's still, however, a good idea to have a breadth-first search of the product's functionality that is done by a real human being.. a vague script fit for human consumption.
I say this because automated tests can only notice what they've been explicitly coded to look for. You can certainly make very advanced automated tests -- including fuzzy bitmap comparison to try ainf find "out of place" things, but the human mind seems to work in just the opposite way: it notices what it wasn't told to look for. That's a fantastic and amazing quality for something tasked with the job of looking for defects in complicated software.
I wonder if Apple had been planning on throwing the magsafe power connector on some future iPhone.
Depending on how the EU decree was worded, presumably they'd be disbarred from doing so now.
Does this law sunset? When mini-USB is as much of a relic as DIN-5 keyboard connectors, or when 95% of phones use inductive charging mats, will EU-market phones still have these silly ports on them?
(incidentally, I hate any non-USB interface on a phone. The EU directive certainly appeals to my current shortsighted desires. But I'm not going to pretend that my desires are anything other than shortsighted -- what we can see easily is that this will stop some of the short term dumbness around proprietary chargers. What we don't see is the other good things some of us will want that this is going to impede or prevent. This is the universal truism of government -- we like what we can see in front of us; we rarely consider the disparate and longer term implications of policy)
Suppose for the sake of argument that I didn't think Beck was a self-serving blowhard asshole (Incidentally, I do); what difference would who I like or dislike make?
I don't see that you've even _started_ to try and reason with me at all, much less my "dogma", much less to the extent that you should tire of it already.
Do you get this bent out of shape everytime someone disagrees with you? Is there a newsletter of yours that is prerequisite material I should have already covered so you don't have to bother to support or justify any of your spew?
Do you actually disagree with my original claims?
#1: IP transit is the _most_ competitive home "service" most people receive
#2: most of the technology used in last-mile IP delivery did not exist even 25 years ago
#3: it is possible for most people to get the right mix of speed and features -- at a price
#4: the fact that there are so many options at so many price points suggests that there IS a market at play here, government collusion notwithstanding
Again -- if amazing broadband is so cheap to provide, why aren't you providing it? It's a serious question. I figure with a few days of reading, I could brush up on a few things and be running a multi-homed ISP. I could make a few arrangements with area businesses and home owners to put p2p optical ethernet links between them and me, and then cover their sites with wifi or wimax. I could get say 100 subscribers pretty easily, and we'll just ignore the startup costs since no company ever has to turn a profit these days.
Now I've got 100 subscribers * $xx revenue stream per month. What are my costs? Upstream and electricity, right? Support costs are zero -- I've replaced all the humans in my operation with tiny shell scripts (as the saying goes...)
This is just my dumb slashdot idea for a small broadband provider. I could do it in a month. I'm sure your idea is better. Why aren't you making an ass-ton of money on it? If there is so much evil corporate greed out there sucking money from people like a vampire, why aren't you in on the take? Better yet, why aren't you doing the ethical thing and offering better service for less money and _still_ raking in the profits?
My very first job was to re-write the C++ billing system for a national dial-up ISP. So I have at least one anecdotal data point about life running consumer IP transit, and how you make money...