Posts by SkippyBing 2364 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2008
So if I spend the money to properly insulate my home, have radiator stats in all rooms and a new boiler, and then figure out how to sensibly set up a timer to accommodate my random-ish schedule I can leave it running all day with negligible increased costs. Or, I could buy a smart thermostat and have decreased running cost. Hmmm, it's hard to know what to go for...
Agreed, i probably don't go straight home from work about the third of the time on an unpredictable basis, so being able to stop the house from pointlessly heating itself up until I'm actually going to be there is saving me a nice chunk of my gas bill. It may even pay for itself in the first year of use.
He's also done 'Wings of the Navy' featuring RN and USN aircraft and 'Wings of the Weird and Wonderful' which feature some of the more notable examples of his test flying career. I think he's done one on the Miles M.52 as well.
I've heard him talk twice and if you get the chance I'd highly recommend taking it.
Competition is a good thing, except where one of your competitors can ignore the rules they wrote and throw an effectively infinite pile of someone else's money at their business. That's not to say I don't think government supply of services is a bad thing, having seen the entirely average level of service my friends in the USA get from their ISP it's hard to see how the government could do a worse job.
I read in Flight about a year ago that the A380 had hit break even at something like 180 orders, over a third of which had gone to Emirates, but that they weren't really getting a lot more coming in.
Actually I've just looked, Emirates now have total orders for 140 out of a world total of 317 firm orders. They've had 69 of the 176 now delivered.
I think that's something to do with a USAF requirement for Air Force 1 to be able to depart with one engine broken (possibly by gunfire) lose another during the take-off roll and still fly away. It's very hard to get a twin engined aircraft to do that.
As an aside I don't think a twin airliner has ever been lost due to multiple engine failures from techinal causes. Running out of fuel or hitting geese yes but you wouldn't be any better off in a four engined plane for the former and the latter would probably be marginal just after take-off in a fully laden airliner.
Oddly they're still taking my money too. I'm working up a suitably irritated tirade to email to Harding as I can't be bothered dealing with their call centre after the hour it took them to tell me the wifi on my router was broken, which was what I told them the problem was at the start...
I'm not 100% up to speed on FAA Regulations, but when I learnt to fly there over a decade ago I think you had to be more than 500' from any person, object or structure, not the ground.
A quick google came up with
FAR 91.119 - Over other than congested areas. An altitude of 500 feet above the surface, except over open water or sparsely populated areas. In those cases, the aircraft may not be operated closer than 500 feet to any person, vessel, vehicle, or structure.
Which does raise the issue of drones being flown in sparsely populated areas.
In defence of Windows based laptops my Toshiba Satellite purchased in 2007 is still going strong despite having circumnavigated the globe, going to Iraq and bouncing round various ships. I did once take it apart to vacuum out the sand from the deserts of the Middle East but even that failed to kill it off. To be fair it now runs Linux Mint but only because Win XP become obsolete and the Win 10 trial didn’t really indicate I’d get blinding performance from that…
'unless they upload all the intervening Position Metadata when you reconnect to the Internet again?
'
Oh they do, I turned my phone's GPS on 5 or 6 times on a transatlantic flight to check if they did. After landing and getting to my friends I checked out my Google location history and sure enough rather than a great circle route from London to LA it joined the dots of where I'd had the GPS on.
Here's a hint, it's very hard to train someone to shoot-to-maim. You teach them to aim at the centre of mass, because it means they're most likely to actually hit the target. It also means they'll probably be dead because that's where the vital organs are.
Ironically if you could teach troops to shoot-to-maim you would because every injured troop requires another one to carry him off the battlefield. Dead ones can wait.
'You only put in the "redundant" (sic) wiring that any idiot can foresee will be required. You just put it in early to make your life easier down the road.'
The B-52 has been in service for over 50 years, if you can see that far into the future for wiring requirements could you tell me next year's grand national winner?
Incidentally the lift fan on the F-35 was a known compromise, the FUBAR is the data fusion on the sensors which has not gone to plan. The lag on the helmet's synthetic vision (lets you see through the floor) makes you wonder how Oculus Rift do it.
There are standards for avionics, shockingly, the issue is you don't want lots of redundant wiring in an aircraft if you can avoid it as it takes away from the available payload, be that fuel, passengers or weapons.
As for a tech refresh in the last possible month in the design phase, they probably did, it can take a few years to fully assess the tenders once they're in on such a complex programme. You don't want to be too cutting edge or you'll end up with an F-35 style FUBAR.
The cost was prohibitive because the development costs for a 100 aircraft programme became spread over 21 aircraft when some bright spark decided they needed to make cost savings. Once you've done the R&D you don't save much, if any, by cutting back on the production run. A lesson the bean counters on either side of the Atlantic seemingly refuse to learn.
I remember being taught Astro-Nav in the Navy* back at the start of the century. My abiding memory is of the instructor saying not to worry if we didn't remember too much of the lessons as if we had to use it for real there'd be plenty of time to read the instructions in the almanac while we waited to take the midday sighting, or for the stars to come out.
*The original one.
You need access to the network to see your pay and administration workflow and send emails asking WTF is going on. To access the network you need to use a computer via a unique log-on. Ergo everyone needs a licence.
Although to be fair the Army didn't used to trust its junior ranks to even look at their pay and admin details online so there's probably a saving to be had there.
Initially they were painted white underneath, or some sort of sky colour, it was found during exercises in the US and Canada that when they banked at low level it rather gave the position away. So they gave it a wraparound camouflage. Yes they were flying that low, at altitude it’s all a bit irrelevant and grey is a better bet.
But, not releasing the black box data to the aviation accident investigation authority responsible is in contravention of international treaty (Annex 13 of the International Treaty on Civil Aviation, I think) for aviation accident investigation. Aviation accident investigation is purely to prevent reoccurence and not to accord blame. There is a slight question over whether this was a civil or military accident, however as it was being flown on a test by an Airbus crew I'd think it was civil at this stage as it hadn't been handed over to the Spanish Air Force.
Of course it's an interesting move by Airbus to confirm the cause of the crash without the data from the black boxes as that may reveal other information.
The nose cone at least needs to have a radar transparent paint on otherwise the returning wigglies might not got back to the antenna. Presumably they don't stock one in an appropriate colour so it stayed grey.
The leading edges may also be coated in some sort of special paint that affects radar wigglies...
I suspect the barge is a SWATH (Small Water Area Twin Hull) style design. Imagine it as a platform sat on two submarines. The buoyancy is provided by the submerged bodies, the pillars connecting them to the platform are narrow in cross section, think of an aerofoil, this means as the waves pass along the vessel there's very little change in the submerged volume, hence little change in buoyancy or vertical movement of the platform. Without anchoring it to the seabed that's about as stable as you'll get.
It will still move with the swell but that's actually fairly predictable and normally quite a long time period unless you're in the sort of sea states where frankly you'd be better of crashing the rocket into the sea.
My car fob recharges itself when it's in the car, it's completely independent from my watches one of which is automatic and needs servicing once a decade and the other two about once every three years. They don't nag me either.
And yet I fear this is a case of build a worse mouse trap and people will still beat a path to your door because it's shiny.
"[...] AZERTY keyboards for no other apparent reason [...]"
My first job post Uni was working in tech support for BP France. Obviously most of their keyboards were AZERTY, I touch type in QWERTY. So I just used the option in Windows to use it as a UK keyboard. This went down less well with my two finger typing colleagues...
GPS already does this, the system runs without leap seconds so has slowly been going out of sync with UTC since 1980 when it started. Your receivers add the necessary fudge to correct to local time anyway so a leap second is a minor additional factor. This probably also helps when GPS timing is being used for timing on critical infrastructure as leap seconds won’t affect it.
'A friend of mine with an Android phone was running out of memory. No problem, his phone has a microSD card slot, so he picked up a card. After probably an hour of fidgeting, the best we could do was get the phone to store new photos on the card. No music or apps or anything else. Supremely disappointed with this supposed advantage of Android phones.'
You probably shouldn't be on an IT site then, I found it trivially easy and haven't actually worked in IT in over a decade and my Dad, who normally calls me before pressing print in Word just in case, has also managed it without any assistance.
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