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Comment Re: self-flying planes (Score 1) 270

You are completely incorrect. The FAA does not agree with Sabri's points at all.

Sabri's basic point was:

"The only things I care about are engine, airspeed and altititude."

Everything else Sabri said supports his view of the basics of flight

Flight 447 was at 38,000 feet when it stalled. 7 miles up provides plenty of safety room to trade altitude for airspeed, and recover from a stall. Instead the co-pilot pulled the stick back, held the stick back, and continued to hold it back the entire time. This basic pilot error contributed to the FAA's 200 page report and their support is mentioned in the first line of the article:

"Commercial airline pilots rely too much on automation in the cockpit and are losing basic flying skills, warns a new Federal Aviation Administration report due out this week."

Comment Re: self-flying planes (Score 1) 270

The FAA agreed with Sabri's general point. The instruments were giving bad information. If the co-pilot had reverted to the basics of flight and set thrust and pitch to normal levels then flight 447 would not have crashed. Instead the co-pilot followed the computers instructions ...kept pulling back and trying to climb. By the time the Pilot figured out what the co-pilot was doing it was too late.

Here are the final words from flight 447's black box:

02:13:40 (Co-pilot1) Mais je suis à fond à cabrer depuis tout à l'heure! At last, Co-pilot1 tells the others the crucial fact whose import he has so grievously failed to understand himself. (But I've had the stick back the whole time!)

02:13:42 (Captain) Non, non, non... Ne remonte pas... non, non. (No, no, no... Don't climb... no, no.)

02:13:43 (Robert) Alors descends... Alors, donne-moi les commandes... Ã moi les commandes! (Descend, then... Give me the controls... Give me the controls!)

Bonin yields the controls, and Robert finally puts the nose down. The plane begins to regain speed. But it is still descending at a precipitous angle. As they near 2000 feet, the aircraft's sensors detect the fast-approaching surface and trigger a new alarm. There is no time left to build up speed by pushing the plane's nose forward into a dive. At any rate, without warning his colleagues, Bonin once again takes back the controls and pulls his side stick all the way back.

02:14:23 (Robert) Putain, on va taper... C'est pas vrai! (Damn it, we're going to crash... This isn't true!)

Comment Re:Seriously. (Score 5, Insightful) 573

Somebody has to actually answer the question for there to be good pages for google to find. This sort of thing also ages pretty quickly, so I think it's worth reanswering at least yearly. Finally, this guy seems to want something that will teach him interesting stuff - not just something that has working flash etc.

I'm not sure the question has a straight answer. It reminds me a little of when I asked my dad about how to evaluate a good wine (about 20 years ago) I expected him to educate me about legs, tanin, body and other quantifiable methods for evaluating a wine. Instead he said it's quite simple really....you drink a lot of them and after a while you start to develop preferences.

In the late '90s and early 2000's I took the same approach to Linux and installed nearly every distribution I could get my hands on. Back in the day they were varietes of Red Hat, Mandrake, Corel, Slackware, Gentoo, Debian...after a while you develop preferences and one distro doesn't fit all needs. To this day I prefere slackware servers, ubuntu desktops, and ipcop for routers/firewalls. But everybody will have their own preferences./P

Comment Re:ridiculous! (Score 1) 501

Does iOS have a useable file system yet? I bought an iPad2 to use for some simple spreadsheets (user just had to enter yes or no in a column) in our warehouse but syncronizing files back and forth between the iPad and workstation was such a hassle that we are back to using a laptop on a rolling cart and the iPad sits in my credenza unused.

Comment Re:First posting? (Score 5, Insightful) 162

Samba is absolutely still important. We just take SAMBA for granted now more than ever because it is pre-installed everywhere in almost every appliance. For example buy a $20 internet 'router' from Best Buy that can share a connected USB drive over a LAN and it probably uses SAMBA for functionality.

Comment Re:The Single Patent? I Thought It Was Six? (Score 1) 149

That together with this would mean Samsung only violated the 3 design patents (the, uh, "rounded corners and color" and "rounded edges on icons" design patents, I'll leave the validity of a patent on those up to the reader).

And Judge Koh has suggested that those design patents are not valid either:

"However, Apple’s evidence does not establish that any of Apple’s three design patents covers a particular feature that actually drives consumer demand. ...First, though more specific than the general “design” allegations, they are still not specific enough to clearly identify actual patented designs. Instead, they refer to such isolated characteristics as glossiness, reinforced glass, black color, metal edges, and reflective screen. Id. Apple does not have a patent on, for example, glossiness, or on black color." -- Judge Koh

Still haven't seen any signs that the judge is likely to overturn the jury's findings though

Comment Re:Find better prospects? (Score 1) 287

You have no idea how excited I was to see this headline on the front page. It seems like only articles about Apple and Android are able to start a good flame war. I miss the days when Slashdot was filled with heated discussions about Java vs C, or Postgres vs MS SQL. The most capable, and underrated database out there IMHO is firebird. Excellent for small to medium sized projects where full ACID compliance was necessary. Fast performance on modest hardware, small memory footprint (for a feature complete database server), can be embedded in an app, business friendly open source licence.

Comment Re:Why is that "interesting"? (Score 5, Interesting) 280

While shopping for a new phone during the summer nearly every store tried to talk me out of HTC

I had researched extensively and found the HTC One V had the best camera on the market for a phone under $200 (with no contract), and was small in size (contrary to the current trend I prefer small phones) and had Android 4 out of the box.

I walked out of one store because the pushed samsung so hard, and out of another store since they no longer carried HTC. Only at the third store did I find the phone.

Incidentally this phone's camera is amazing if you're a photographer and like to tinker. It gives you true autofocus. Exposure control to plus or minus two stops, and a mode that brackets exposure (-1, 0, +1) and puts the three images together to give high contrast scenes beautifully smooth detail.

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