Posts by werdsmith 7139 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Feb 2011
In my day this kind of trickery was being tested with Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) for GPS. This is a ground based system that increases the usable accuracy of GPS. Autoland can only operate where the ground systems are in place and this is at major facilities that can justify it.
Bigger issue is ground taxi, as with AutoDriving Beta's too many random items moving around between rampies, service vehicles and other aircraft.
This is not a big problem with single pilot operations. Nobody is suggesting pilotless yet.
but if you did, then I presume the aircraft would be towed out to the runway hold point. There are already some trials going on towing the aircraft out to the hold in order to save the taxi fuel.
Old fashioned cars also use various kinds of battery and other materials that are of similar source to the ones that are being whinged about here.
Lots of work is going into improved energy storage density cells with an aim to avoid the use of these environmentally unsound materials.
This work is only happening now because it is being driven by the move to EV.
They have customers because the incredibly high cost is usually something that is dealt with at upper levels of management where all the morons are. In many cases their software does not offer value to a business where the benefit of using it is worth its cost. I have managed to help people get Oracle instances moved to Postgre, with better results in terms of performance, TCO and supportability.
I will not have anything tainted by the red monster anywhere near me. No MySQL, no Java, and no Oracle DB. I accept that I am missing out on the one thing I would be interested in - VirtualBox, but that is the cost of descumming.
If you agree to purchase a version of SQL Server then your licensing terms are the ones agreed at the time you purchase, they don't change next year if you are still using the same version. Nor do they change if you upgrade using Software Assurance.
You can still license Server+CAL or by core (in packs of 2 minimum 4) it hasn't really changed much recently except for the addition of pay as you go option.
Having a think about this, I have 30 days of leave plus public holidays. I use them all, any left at the end of the year I tag onto Christmas / New Year shutdown, have a 3 week break.
If I didn’t have that number 30 to aim at, maybe I would end up taking less days off.
I recall over hearing two ladies who worked as prototype wiring people, having a conversation: “I’ve still got three sick days left, I don’t when when I’m going to take them”. I think referring to her annual allocation of days that can be taken sick with full pay.
“Four star” was banned in 2000 so that was a very old example of a Subaru Forester which first appeared in 1997. But I recall any Subaru EJ Boxer engine was very thirsty by European standards. Probably not bad compared to the average under endowed compensating Hemi driver.
It's a bit of a stretch to claim the launch is from British soil, when the first part is simply transporting the rocket to it's actual launch site over the Atlantic.
It’s using the Boeing as a first stage. Just like launches from Florida use a rocket as a first stage and then somewhere over the Atlantic it drops the first stage and then another booster actually takes the payload to orbit.
But this is just a team from the US using a runway in Cornwall for no actual pragmatic reason than a bit of flag waving.
The first Black Arrow satellite launch attempt failed on a second stage problem, but they were ready to go again and successful within 2 months. I wonder if Virgin Orbit will be back for another go so quickly.
Virgin Orbit are planning on doing a similar stunt in Brazil and another in Australia so I am starting to feel like this is a travelling circus act.
On the live stream it was fairly obvious something was wrong as around the end of the 2nd stage first burn and the start of the coasting phase, the telemetry showed it hadn’t reached orbital velocity, the altitude went down rapidly and it decelerated. It stopped showing descent and went to zero mph at 244,500 feet, presumably when it broke up. It took them 25 minutes after this to announce there was anomaly.
The live stream before that was off the scale bullshit with random Americans spewing disingenuous platitudes and Richard Branson wittering on about when the Virgin Records label signed the Rolling Stones.
I think it’s for taking photos.
I must admit I have a CCD eyepiece and a goto mount, and a carefully fettled Raspberry Pi so I can observe indoors on a 65 inch TV. Because the clearest nights are the coldest nights. Loads of people use setups like this, the idea is far from new. You can share near live images on the web. It’s not like astronomers are lesser astronomers because they book an observation from a robotic telescope on a mountain top in Tenerife or South America and collect their image next morning.
But Saturn just looks the same as the first time you saw it, and Jupiter, changes a bit and its Galilean satellites move about. Mars is very consistent . Nebulae don’t change much. Galaxies are fairly inert. The real variables are the observation conditions and the opportunities plus the occasional cometary visitor.
I have a connected car app/account and it is so secure that I can’t get into it myself.
It sends a code to the car which appears on the screen and it won’t work unless I put that code in and I can’t be bothered to do it again. So it just locks me out.
It was sort of useful if I couldn’t remember locking the car I could quickly check, but not that big a deal.
An aircraft on autopilot will follow the flight plan and land itself if it's in approach mode.
You are getting confused, most autopilots on GA aircraft are height and heading hold systems, or just heading hold. I use one, I tell it what heading I want, and I have to calculate the wind offset to obtain the track I want. There is no FMS for me to input a flight plan and no chance of it flying an ILS. But it is most definitely an autopilot, manufactured by Bendix/King.
If you want to fly an automatic approach and landing then you need a cat 3 autoland system, not an autopilot, and you need to be landing on a cat 3 equipped runway. This is done for low visibility situations and in most cases the first officer will hand fly the flare and landing.
is that if the driver is supposed to be alert and with their hands on the wheel .... why can't they just drive it instead?!?
Have you tried it? In some circumstances it really does help with long drives, the precise lane keeping and steady distance keeping is lifted from you leaving you to just watch for hazards and monitor the other traffic.
I just find it unusable when the road is busy because the actions of other drivers are constantly affecting it.
I also predict that hardware people will extend RISC V implementations in a proprietary way in attempts to get a performance / market advantage.
This may lead to fragmentation that holds RISC V back, or if one comes to dominate then it will surpass ARM but put us back to square one with the proprietary ownership.
I have my second EV, it’s not a Tesla and it was expensive. But I haven’t got it for the economics, that is not the first consideration, I know it would be cheaper to drive an old fashioned petrol car. There is no economic justification claimed.
But there’s no way on Earth I would ever willingly go back to driving an old fashioned ICE powered car, the EV experience is just so much better for me. I also like that my engine isn’t adding to local air pollution.
The problem for Tesla is that there are better alternatives now, and the alternatives are improving still faster. When I was buying the first EV years ago, I considered Tesla but found better. For my next EV car, didn’t even consider Tesla.
It's the classic Trump approach to business - refuse to pay bills and hope the creditors go bust before they can get you to court.
It will be the appointed receiver taking them to court. Does the same thing happen with chapter 11? I would assume so.
Anyway, a business that operated that way should have some difficulty finding suppliers willing to work with them.
The AA and other breakdown services carry portable chargers that can add approx 7.5 miles of range in 15 minutes.
However, the portable chargers packs that you can buy are considerably more expensive and heavier than a petrol container. They are on wheely wheels with a handle like luggage.
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