No, I have not flown a heavy. Have You? Or do you know something specific about what magic functions the "Autopilot" does?
There is the basic fly-by-wire system that controls the primary surfaces, and has some smarts e.g. about pulling too much G. Hopefully that is very hard to turn off otherwise very bad things will happen.
But on the old heavies autopilots had extra functions like managing a smooth descent, but nothing too special. I would think that landing without one would be very common simulator practice. They are flying near VNE, so need to take care, but that is clearly marked on mechanical ASIs, and I would assume the screens.
Anyway if you actually know something then speak up, would be interesting to hear.
So one cracked solder joint made the entire plane unflyable? Who designs these things!
While it is entirely possible that there is some weird idiot design choice that made this so, it is much, much more likely that the pilots were totally incompetent and did not know the first thing about flying. The co-pilot was French and apparently held the stick hard back. That is the same idiot mistake that a different french pilot made some years ago over the Atlantic.
The pilots tried to reboot the computer system to clear the error. This caused the autopilot to turn off. They then didn't do anything, thinking the autopilot was flying. Only when the plane was going out of control did they start trying to fly it themselves.
You've never flown a plane, have you.
The Autopilot is fluff, like cruise control on a car. Turn it off and you just need to do more work, that's all. If a cruise control was wildly changing your speed you would just turn it off, wouldn't you. But not being able to recover from a stall for a pilot is like a driver who does not know how to brake strongly when required. Basic, 101 stuff.
But it don't support pointer arithmetic. Every slash dot reader knows that you need pointer arithmentic (char *x; x++) in order to be efficient.
Seriously, the early Pascals were rather fascists about type safety. So the whole world jumped to that miserable excuse of a language called C which let them do what they thought they wanted to do.
(I grew up on the original Wirth Pascal on a Cyber with 60 bit words. That is what all that packed character stuff was about.)
If animal-like thing appears in front then
If nothing is behind and road is safe then
maximum brake
Else if other car is far behind
maximum brake but monitor closing distance of car and release brakes if too close
Else if other car is close behind
moderate brake and monitor other car's reaction
Endif Endif
The above is a simplification, but that type of reasoning is not very hard. Recognizing fluffy is an animal and not just a pot hole, now that is tricky.
And how many people when seeing fluffy carefully monitor the car behind them when applying brakes?!
Things do not need to have human level intelligence to be able to work in the real world. And being able to read road signs is very doable today. The original post seemed to think that use a GPS is AI which it clearly is not, but being able to drive down most roads is not a particularly difficult task, even if it is much more difficult than playing chess, say.
Consider a wasp, with a nervous system smaller than a pin head, and all the complex behaviors it exhibits in the natural world. Driving a car is simpler than that.
It is actually worse than that. If binary backwards compatibility is your goal, then why would you move the 32 bit DLLs at all! Leave them there and all will be good for legacy, but new programs will need some changes which is also OK. And then no funny mappings are required.
Um, yes, that is what source compatibility is all about. Some source would have needed to be change for programs that hard coded the System32 folder name, among other things. I have never seen a non-trivial 32 bit program that could be run 64 bit without changes.
OTOH, what about a 32 bit program that is expected to remain 32 bit. It might also have hard coded System32. And that is where weird and dangerous hacks refer some, but not other, file references to WoW64!!! One thing that is for sure is that 32 bit programs should have remained compatible with running in 32 bit mode.
It was a surreal design decision that says a lot about the company that made it. I don't think that Gates ever made a dumb decision like that, but then he started as an engineer so knew what code actually was.
Compatibility is important. But there was no need to put the 32 bit binaries in WoW64! They should have stayed in System32, and a new folder (or folders!) created for the 64bit, and then no magic registry hacks etc.
Not as long as people insist on using archaic programming languages such as C.
Programs are distributed 32 bit, and often rely on 3rd party add ons that are 32 bit. And never the two shall be combined into a single process, even if the actual memory requirements are small. That is why Office is normally run in 32 bit mode -- the add ins.
A better idea would have been to allow 32 bit windows to run with more than 4 gig of ram, and 4 gig per process rather than 2. That would have pushed off the 64bit day quite a bit.
This is not a problem with.Net (or Java) of course. They Jit compile, optimized to the specific machine. No 64bit issues, no opaque type issues. And Java can even reference 32 gig of memory with 32bit pointers (by enforcing alignment) which almost halves the amount of memory a 64bit application needs.
The problem is not Microsoft. The problem is C. But given C, to kill 32bit would have been to kill Windows. (And even Linux allows 32 bit programs on 64bit O/S.)
As to WoW64, that was entirely gratuatous, as per my other post above. And given COM it should also have been possible to run 64bit programs in 32bit processors, albeit restricted to 4 gig. (There had to be something potentially good about COM.) But that is not how it is.
Windows did something far weirder than focus on the ABI.
The WoW64 folder holds the 32 bit DLLs while the System32 folder holds the 64bit DLLs. There is then black magic that usually redirects 32 bit applications to the different Wow64 folder.
The idea was not binary compatibility but source compatibility. Someone in the hierarchy must have dictated that C programs must be able to be recompiled in 64bit with zero code changes. Only an MBA with zero programming background could think that this largely impossible mandate justifies permanently twisting the system with weird rules.
No, I would suggest that most slash dotters would think they are both a colossal waste of money that should have been spent on real science. How many probes could we have sent to Mars? The Webb tellescope. Europa. The list goes on.
The put people in orbit game was over with Mir and Skylab. Putting more and more people in orbit is just a waste. There is also no point in sending people to Mars, robots rule in space. And it is not going to happen any time soon, so at least no money is being wasted on it.
Whenever a large IT project succeeds, some piece of bureaucratic process can and thus will become more complex.
Consider the Australian tax office (or IRS). It costs the same proportion of GDP as it did 60 years ago, before any automation at all. But the tax legislation is several orders of magnitude more complex now. You could simply not support the current mess without a computer, it would have to be kept simple. It is the successful projects that enable the mess to be produced. Fortunately, many tax office projects fail. Imagine how bad things would be if they all succeeded!
When small projects fail, the contractors move on. By the time large projects fail senior managers need to be promoted.
Over time, people that work on smaller projects are the competent ones, whereas the people that work on large projects have fantastic skills in working in a bureaucracy, but none in actually developing software.
The space shuttle had a clear goal, namely to launch stuff into low orbit cheaply. There are various ways to measure the cost per Kg launched, but even if one ignores the huge research cost, the shuttle fails big time. The Russians can launch stuff using relatively simple rockets for a fraction of the cost. And a Saturn V can launch bigger payloads into *low orbit*, I would think.
Worse, having built the wretched thing an excuse had to be found to use it, and that lead to the ISS. A huge white elephant.
Imagine the real science that could have been done if those funds had been spent correctly. Certainly the Web telescope would have been launched years ago. Many more probes to Mars, including digging some holes. Europa....
Comments like that will make you unemployable. Today software is all about continuous integration, automated testing and 100% code coverage. If you test every line of code in your system what could possibly go wrong? No longer the drudgery of major and minor releases, today every nightly build is a releasable product. Even Microsoft has taken this on, Windows 10 will be the "last" version. Customers upgrade continuously secure in the knowledge that bugs are a thing of the past....
People are pretty good at abstracting from a simple display to the real thing. There is a short period when learning to fly when working the actual controls has to be mastered, and an accurate simulator would be helpful. But soon that becomes second nature and the real learning begins.
Most of the time is learning procedures, navigation, etc. And that can be done on a very ordinary simulator.
How on earth did it become *so* expensive? This is not a problem in other countries, where pathology is an order of magnitude cheaper than the US. And it is paid for by governments which makes it free to patients in other western countries (certainly here in oz). And no, that does not kill the national budget -- detecting issues early with pathology often saves the government money.
It was a technology demonstration of DEC's (remember Digital Equipment? If so you are old!) new Alpha chips and servers, so powerful that they could index the entire early 1990s web. A very minor side project.
When Compaq bought DEC, they were surprised to find that they had also bought Alta Vista. Around then somebody tried to commercialize it and killed it in the process.
Yes, but you also demand vast amounts of useless functionality. 100% compatibility with every ill-concieved feature that has ever been added in the past. To be in lock step with the latest fads in UI. And that means huge amounts of code, and huge amounts of complexity.
Which is why your containers will leak like a sieve.
Why all these fancy Lidar systems? What is wrong with stereo vision. Full vision is a tough problem, but basic stereo was worked out decades ago. Have to cameras pointing in the same direction, recognize common features in both pictures (the tricky part), do a bit of trig (easy), and you know exactly how far away they are.
Where does all this anti-Assange fluster come from? How could you know any more about it then anyone else that follows the media? Do you passionately believe that Assange was fundamentally evil to release videos about shooting civilians from helicopters? You could not be a rabid feminist because virtually no women read slash dot! Assange is clearly a bit of an arsehole, but it is equally obvious that these "rape" claims are dubious.
You have not debunked anything. If you could actually produce decent references to a few ground facts that would be most helpful.
The lobster dinner is obviously absolutely relevant. In these consent rape cases the question is whether the woman actually gave consent or not, i.e. who is telling the truth. A woman that thinks she was violated, raped, does not normally then have a pleasant dinner with her attacker. And these appear to be intelligent, independent women, so why would they not report such a serious attack to the police immediately and then follow through? As far as I can determine this is entirely driven by the prosecutor, and not the women who would rather forget about it.
As to the loaded word "rape", that implies a certain amount of violence. Grabbing some woman, beating her up and forcing sex with her. If the charge about the broken condom is in fact true it is hardly in the same category. And who remains asleep while someone is fucking them anyway -- there is no claim that she was very drunk.
Questioning him remotely would do a lot of good because it puts that issue at rest. More pressure could be put on Ecuador as a result. And the Swedes could say that they have everything possible.
The big problem for Ny is that if she questions him after all this time it would be politically impossible for Ny to drop the charges. And then she would have to charge him with something very specific, with details handed over to Assange's defense team etc. And that would make Ny look ridiculous. So she does nothing and hopes to retire before the issue comes to a head.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I have not flown a heavy. Have You? Or do you know something specific about what magic functions the "Autopilot" does?
There is the basic fly-by-wire system that controls the primary surfaces, and has some smarts e.g. about pulling too much G. Hopefully that is very hard to turn off otherwise very bad things will happen.
But on the old heavies autopilots had extra functions like managing a smooth descent, but nothing too special. I would think that landing without one would be very common simulator practice. They are flying near VNE, so need to take care, but that is clearly marked on mechanical ASIs, and I would assume the screens.
Anyway if you actually know something then speak up, would be interesting to hear.
So one cracked solder joint made the entire plane unflyable? Who designs these things!
While it is entirely possible that there is some weird idiot design choice that made this so, it is much, much more likely that the pilots were totally incompetent and did not know the first thing about flying. The co-pilot was French and apparently held the stick hard back. That is the same idiot mistake that a different french pilot made some years ago over the Atlantic.
The pilots tried to reboot the computer system to clear the error. This caused the autopilot to turn off. They then didn't do anything, thinking the autopilot was flying. Only when the plane was going out of control did they start trying to fly it themselves.
You've never flown a plane, have you.
The Autopilot is fluff, like cruise control on a car. Turn it off and you just need to do more work, that's all. If a cruise control was wildly changing your speed you would just turn it off, wouldn't you. But not being able to recover from a stall for a pilot is like a driver who does not know how to brake strongly when required. Basic, 101 stuff.
But it don't support pointer arithmetic. Every slash dot reader knows that you need pointer arithmentic (char *x; x++) in order to be efficient.
Seriously, the early Pascals were rather fascists about type safety. So the whole world jumped to that miserable excuse of a language called C which let them do what they thought they wanted to do.
(I grew up on the original Wirth Pascal on a Cyber with 60 bit words. That is what all that packed character stuff was about.)
Does the new Pascal let you increment a pointer through an array yet (char *x; x++)?
Every slash dot reader *knows* that that is an essential feature of any programming language in order for it to be efficient.
+1. Except that the human need not actually be in the car, but may be in a third world transport control centre.
For more ideas on this see
http://www.computersthink.com/
Um, Rule 43589:-
If animal-like thing appears in front then
If nothing is behind and road is safe then
maximum brake
Else if other car is far behind
maximum brake but monitor closing distance of car and release brakes if too close
Else if other car is close behind
moderate brake and monitor other car's reaction
Endif
Endif
The above is a simplification, but that type of reasoning is not very hard. Recognizing fluffy is an animal and not just a pot hole, now that is tricky.
And how many people when seeing fluffy carefully monitor the car behind them when applying brakes?!
Anthony
Things do not need to have human level intelligence to be able to work in the real world. And being able to read road signs is very doable today. The original post seemed to think that use a GPS is AI which it clearly is not, but being able to drive down most roads is not a particularly difficult task, even if it is much more difficult than playing chess, say.
Consider a wasp, with a nervous system smaller than a pin head, and all the complex behaviors it exhibits in the natural world. Driving a car is simpler than that.
Have a look at
http://www.computersthink.com/
for some ideas on this.
It is actually worse than that. If binary backwards compatibility is your goal, then why would you move the 32 bit DLLs at all! Leave them there and all will be good for legacy, but new programs will need some changes which is also OK. And then no funny mappings are required.
Um, yes, that is what source compatibility is all about. Some source would have needed to be change for programs that hard coded the System32 folder name, among other things. I have never seen a non-trivial 32 bit program that could be run 64 bit without changes.
OTOH, what about a 32 bit program that is expected to remain 32 bit. It might also have hard coded System32. And that is where weird and dangerous hacks refer some, but not other, file references to WoW64!!! One thing that is for sure is that 32 bit programs should have remained compatible with running in 32 bit mode.
It was a surreal design decision that says a lot about the company that made it. I don't think that Gates ever made a dumb decision like that, but then he started as an engineer so knew what code actually was.
Compatibility is important. But there was no need to put the 32 bit binaries in WoW64! They should have stayed in System32, and a new folder (or folders!) created for the 64bit, and then no magic registry hacks etc.
Not as long as people insist on using archaic programming languages such as C.
Programs are distributed 32 bit, and often rely on 3rd party add ons that are 32 bit. And never the two shall be combined into a single process, even if the actual memory requirements are small. That is why Office is normally run in 32 bit mode -- the add ins.
A better idea would have been to allow 32 bit windows to run with more than 4 gig of ram, and 4 gig per process rather than 2. That would have pushed off the 64bit day quite a bit.
This is not a problem with .Net (or Java) of course. They Jit compile, optimized to the specific machine. No 64bit issues, no opaque type issues. And Java can even reference 32 gig of memory with 32bit pointers (by enforcing alignment) which almost halves the amount of memory a 64bit application needs.
The problem is not Microsoft. The problem is C. But given C, to kill 32bit would have been to kill Windows. (And even Linux allows 32 bit programs on 64bit O/S.)
As to WoW64, that was entirely gratuatous, as per my other post above. And given COM it should also have been possible to run 64bit programs in 32bit processors, albeit restricted to 4 gig. (There had to be something potentially good about COM.) But that is not how it is.
Windows did something far weirder than focus on the ABI.
The WoW64 folder holds the 32 bit DLLs while the System32 folder holds the 64bit DLLs. There is then black magic that usually redirects 32 bit applications to the different Wow64 folder.
The idea was not binary compatibility but source compatibility. Someone in the hierarchy must have dictated that C programs must be able to be recompiled in 64bit with zero code changes. Only an MBA with zero programming background could think that this largely impossible mandate justifies permanently twisting the system with weird rules.
Don't get me started on Program Files (X64) ...
No, I would suggest that most slash dotters would think they are both a colossal waste of money that should have been spent on real science. How many probes could we have sent to Mars? The Webb tellescope. Europa. The list goes on.
The put people in orbit game was over with Mir and Skylab. Putting more and more people in orbit is just a waste. There is also no point in sending people to Mars, robots rule in space. And it is not going to happen any time soon, so at least no money is being wasted on it.
Whenever a large IT project succeeds, some piece of bureaucratic process can and thus will become more complex.
Consider the Australian tax office (or IRS). It costs the same proportion of GDP as it did 60 years ago, before any automation at all. But the tax legislation is several orders of magnitude more complex now. You could simply not support the current mess without a computer, it would have to be kept simple. It is the successful projects that enable the mess to be produced. Fortunately, many tax office projects fail. Imagine how bad things would be if they all succeeded!
http://berglas.org/Articles/Im...
When small projects fail, the contractors move on. By the time large projects fail senior managers need to be promoted.
Over time, people that work on smaller projects are the competent ones, whereas the people that work on large projects have fantastic skills in working in a bureaucracy, but none in actually developing software.
The space shuttle had a clear goal, namely to launch stuff into low orbit cheaply. There are various ways to measure the cost per Kg launched, but even if one ignores the huge research cost, the shuttle fails big time. The Russians can launch stuff using relatively simple rockets for a fraction of the cost. And a Saturn V can launch bigger payloads into *low orbit*, I would think.
Worse, having built the wretched thing an excuse had to be found to use it, and that lead to the ISS. A huge white elephant.
Imagine the real science that could have been done if those funds had been spent correctly. Certainly the Web telescope would have been launched years ago. Many more probes to Mars, including digging some holes. Europa. ...
Comments like that will make you unemployable. Today software is all about continuous integration, automated testing and 100% code coverage. If you test every line of code in your system what could possibly go wrong? No longer the drudgery of major and minor releases, today every nightly build is a releasable product. Even Microsoft has taken this on, Windows 10 will be the "last" version. Customers upgrade continuously secure in the knowledge that bugs are a thing of the past....
People are pretty good at abstracting from a simple display to the real thing. There is a short period when learning to fly when working the actual controls has to be mastered, and an accurate simulator would be helpful. But soon that becomes second nature and the real learning begins.
Most of the time is learning procedures, navigation, etc. And that can be done on a very ordinary simulator.
How on earth did it become *so* expensive? This is not a problem in other countries, where pathology is an order of magnitude cheaper than the US. And it is paid for by governments which makes it free to patients in other western countries (certainly here in oz). And no, that does not kill the national budget -- detecting issues early with pathology often saves the government money.
It was a technology demonstration of DEC's (remember Digital Equipment? If so you are old!) new Alpha chips and servers, so powerful that they could index the entire early 1990s web. A very minor side project.
When Compaq bought DEC, they were surprised to find that they had also bought Alta Vista. Around then somebody tried to commercialize it and killed it in the process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Yes, but you also demand vast amounts of useless functionality. 100% compatibility with every ill-concieved feature that has ever been added in the past. To be in lock step with the latest fads in UI. And that means huge amounts of code, and huge amounts of complexity.
Which is why your containers will leak like a sieve.
Why all these fancy Lidar systems? What is wrong with stereo vision. Full vision is a tough problem, but basic stereo was worked out decades ago. Have to cameras pointing in the same direction, recognize common features in both pictures (the tricky part), do a bit of trig (easy), and you know exactly how far away they are.
Where does all this anti-Assange fluster come from? How could you know any more about it then anyone else that follows the media? Do you passionately believe that Assange was fundamentally evil to release videos about shooting civilians from helicopters? You could not be a rabid feminist because virtually no women read slash dot! Assange is clearly a bit of an arsehole, but it is equally obvious that these "rape" claims are dubious.
You have not debunked anything. If you could actually produce decent references to a few ground facts that would be most helpful.
The lobster dinner is obviously absolutely relevant. In these consent rape cases the question is whether the woman actually gave consent or not, i.e. who is telling the truth. A woman that thinks she was violated, raped, does not normally then have a pleasant dinner with her attacker. And these appear to be intelligent, independent women, so why would they not report such a serious attack to the police immediately and then follow through? As far as I can determine this is entirely driven by the prosecutor, and not the women who would rather forget about it.
As to the loaded word "rape", that implies a certain amount of violence. Grabbing some woman, beating her up and forcing sex with her. If the charge about the broken condom is in fact true it is hardly in the same category. And who remains asleep while someone is fucking them anyway -- there is no claim that she was very drunk.
Questioning him remotely would do a lot of good because it puts that issue at rest. More pressure could be put on Ecuador as a result. And the Swedes could say that they have everything possible.
The big problem for Ny is that if she questions him after all this time it would be politically impossible for Ny to drop the charges. And then she would have to charge him with something very specific, with details handed over to Assange's defense team etc. And that would make Ny look ridiculous. So she does nothing and hopes to retire before the issue comes to a head.