TheAnimus

I find myself increasingly not using my Arduino stuff, the problem is I want to use it for complex things, and it just isn't as much fun.

My weapon of choice, 10 years ago was always a PIC micro, I prefered them to the Atmel, and I'd mostly write in MASM using my own IDE that provided some useful additions to the macros I normally used (branch highlighting etc).

This was great for hobby stuff, stuff only I'm working on. I know precisely how long an instruction or macro will take, I can make really accurate timings. Great! I even got an In Circuit Debugger.

I can't really drop down to that stuff on an Arduino, so I'll end up with a few PICs for doing the signals interfacing stuff, ok that's fine. But that means I'm normally wanting more of the 'intelligent' uC.

Which is why I like my .Net Fez board. It's great for hobbiests, whilst the TinyCLR is frustratingly behind .Net, it's still better than Java in many ways.

However, I look at the price of that, and I look at a mobile phone. I can happily talk to a PIC via the audio jack for most things. I've got a brilliant touch screen, controller, wifi and enough memory to run complex things written in a high level language. It even has a battery too.

Which is why I can't help but feel there is a missing trick with hobby micro electronics at the moment, more effort should be around re-purposing the ultra cheap hardware that is a mobile phone.

Full discolusre, I'm dyslexic. I've spent DAYS working on bugs that were typos that I just couldn't notice. This may well make me rather biased.

However I strongly disagree with this, TypeScript isn't ment to 'Fix' JavaScript, as any valid JS is valid TS. This limits a lot.

What it does do, is reduce boiler plate, give you a take as much as you want level of typing. No features are missing, you can always just <any> and do what you want.

The 'flaw' that the Type Defintions for a library might change, and be out of date, is a also a massive con. Want to see if I've any simple type missing or changed errors introduced by an otherwise innocuous library change? Easy! Granted, it's no replacement for integration testing, to ensure functions still behave as expected.

The comment about the 'this' issue that plagues the functional mascarading as a class nature of JS, is incomplete. It is simple to fix in TS, using the Lambda notation.

The word here is investigators, I assumed that this was some legal entity (FBI?) doing it with court orders.

Not likely.

The Pitot static systems (which are redundant) on a 777 are very far aware from the transponders. So this fire that magically spread all the way across that, somehow allowed auto pilot to have enough elevator control, change the engine power, but not realise it was hitting the ceiling, then was able to calmly decent from an above service ceiling height?

Incredibly unlikely set of events.

I don't know where you got your ATP from, but there isn't a good reason, in clear weather, to climb above the service ceiling for your air-plane.

Now, I don't miss-underestimate how failures happen, how they combine, but I know my procedures. If I'm pulling fuses for things, I'm going to first SQUARK 7700, have the co-pilot screaming on 121.5, whilst he is charged with flying the plane (following a heading, not dropping out of the sky, like AF447!) whilst I then follow the procedures for the kind of electrical fire. Even if it's only for 10 seconds, the 7700 will be picked up, the ATC will see it light up like an angry chirstmas tree. It will not be 'cancelled' by the transponder then being switched off, the operative would have to cancel it, which they wouldn't do until after contact had been reached. In the case of say 7500, they wouldn't take radio as reason to cancel it.

The point is, the transponder just happened to turn off at the perfect moment (between two ATC services) after the ACARS had been switched off long before.

If you had a fire, that had endangered physically separated, redundant systems in that manner, I doubt the plane would be able to fly for 7 hours. The 777 is a fly by wire plane.

However, if you wanted to drop off, un-noticed, it is the perfect time.

Occam's razor n all that. If I thought such failures were possible, as I've said before, I'd shred my pilots license tomorrow.

this fire just happened to cut out all four radio circuits, both transponders (physically separate systems) before he could squark about it, or contact anyone on the radio? I really doubt that.

If I thought that was possible, I wouldn't fly the little sheds I do for fun.

>Could a pilot do this completely on his own? Turn off the communication system, fly 4 hours into a different direction and then nosedive into the ocean?

Yes.

Egypt Air is an example of a pilot committing suicide, before doing so he pulled the circuit breakers for most systems including some for the flight data recorders (black boxes).

For safety reasons a pilot needs to be able to quickly isolate any system (even ones that are 'vital'). If the pilot wishes to kill everyone, he will, there is no point trying to design against that. However as the vast majority of pilots are frequently making changes to the automated systems idea of the world for the better of the plane.

At the moment on many forums there are a lot of comments from people saying we need to clip the wings, so to speak, of pilots, limit what they can do. These people have never sat on the left.

You don't need a transponder to show up on radar, it just makes it a lot easier.

Radar operators have a hard job telling a plane from clouds or echos. A transponder makes that job a lot, lot easier.

However, if you have a good radar system, you can happily track the contact without a transponder. In fact this happens all the time, I had a very nice chap at Farnbourgh West LARS (Low Altitude Radar Service) do this for me, when the shed I was flying had a little bit of a failure. For newewer systems such as those used by NATS automatically keeps the data assigned with the trace, using their proprietary algos to filter the noise.

If this happened over the UK, the transponder went off, ATC couldn't reach them, then a couple of Typhoons would be sent up to go have a look, and if need be escort.

With this background understanding of how modern Radar services are used piratically, taking into account a bit of background of the Malaysian authorities (short version: no terrorist attacks have ever happened even with our extremist religious views, honest.) Then this article will make some more sense: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/13/mh370-satellite...

It is becoming clear they knew full well what was going on. They had the ACARS data. They had contacts on their radar, which they would have understood to be the plane, if not at the time, soon after. (But they really should have understood at the time!).

This stuff happens all the time in air safety investigations. See Egypt Air, or Air France!

Or be like plenty of places in Europe, chuck 50c in the basket outside the toilet. More if it's a number 2. Or if it was really clean.

One of the worst moments I had was in a rural part of Belgium, I had a call of nature whilst in the cafe, after completion I realised I had no euros left. Walk of shame to my table, the waiter notices nothing went in the basket and says something about Englanders just loud enough for me to hear.

That's not true at all.

It will be liable to CGT, (Capital Gains Tax, which is higher than VAT for those earning more than about $50k per year), it must be declared with your self assessment.

As it tests if it it's equal to 0x23dc67e8 after XOR, I'm guessing this is a protection against some patching or similar.

It get's XOR'd once after the GetProcAddress, then XOR'd back before the STDCALL invocation.

This is done for both the GetProcAddress calls, so I'm going to just guess that this is some anti-patching anti-cheat shenanigans.

But if you study now, you are going to have $150k of debt just for your full license and maybe one larger type rating. Any jet time and that number will rise very quickly.

I hear from my US pilot friends, that they also must have a college education too.

Compare that to the UK, where training costs more, but is often paid by the company in exchange for 5 years, the wages are a lot higher.

In the US, my instructor was charging pretty much minimum wage, he needed the hours, he was a very good instructor. In the UK I've had terrible instructors who are still demanding $80 per hour. (And some great retired old timers who do it for free, the love of the antique planes!)

The US is very lucky, there is a massive military that pumps out trained pilots, some even with ATP, I think this is one of the reasons why they have been able to pay so little.

However the rest of the world pays more.

For me, it's the design of Metro UI.

I remember the first WIMP computer I had (well my dad had) an A5000, with 4mb of RAM (this had to be soldered on, and was considered wantantly excessive). If I wanted 256 colours, resolution would suffer as it lacked VRAM.

Windows 98 had gradient title bars, I this was a big deal. I remember being impressed by how smooth it looked. I wasn't completely used to high resolution, high colour systems.

Metro shuns this, information is put above anything else, the fact that I only want to see my mobile signal if I've a problem by default, it is hidden unless I have none.

It doesn't take long before this really starts to make sense. I'm tired, I don't want to be bamboozled by information, I want important stuff put up above anything else.

It's exactly the same reason Web Browsers have 'hidden' away the lesser used functions. I type this on a desktop with 2 * 30" of screen real estate, yet I still want my browser to hide the file menu, have no favourites bar, not waste space for the tabs and the title bar. You get where I'm going with this.

I also have a few Android devices, and a iPad, I find it almost tiring to use them in a way, I'm no longer impressed by having a 3d glass effect or similar, it just impedes my usability. I don't like skeuomorphic patterns, I'm an veteran user, I don't need familiarity, I want information presented as effortlessly as possible.

That said, I hate the lack of a notification timeline. I am genuinely saddened to see how Windows Phone team appears to have lost their release cycle momentum (three years ago major features came fast and frequent, now... not much).

It's brilliant, and it will work, and continue to work until people don't believe in it.

We can split hairs on definitions as long as you like. The trading desk I used to work at, we used to even have the phrase ponzi asset. It is quite common for firms in trouble to pay large dividends, to improve the stock rating, so they can raise more money. I worked on an equity derivs desk and have been corrupted by their terminology and no doubt thinking. I hope I made clear what I consider to be the issues, that lead me to want to use a negative word.

>as the market for Bitcoin has grown it has become less volatile.

I do not agree, the vomma does not show this characteristic trending in a reliable fashion.

I think the biggest fault with bitcoin is the name, coin.

People like coins and cash to be liquid, stable, and ultimately not a ponzi scheme (by this I mean growing by an ever slowing amount, that gives added value to those who mined early and held, punishing any sizeable withdrawal, dividends paid only due to more outside money coming to the fund..).

Too many people have taken to investing in it with the attitude that it always rises, yet in a classic characteristic of a bubble backed entity it doesn't take much to crash the value of the asset.

Just tried to sign up for the 10TB plan, figure it's a good price for backing up my archive of DNG photographs, which is about 1TB.

Not going well so far, credit card form was in french... Said it failed, it refreshed itself, says it's worked, but it isn't showing up on my account.

Something tells me that 10 euros is going to cost a hell of a lot more than that of my time getting to the bottom of this.

I always tell the same story about Sony.

The NetMD.

Back in the day flash memory was expensive, the RioDimond was for geeks who had far too much money and far too little music.

The NetMD was brilliant, Transfer music via USB from your PC, long battery life, cheap enough MDs, you could have days of music with you. I loved the device, I loved the concept.

The software. Oh my. The software. Ergh.

Apparently it had the code name symphony. A quick history lesson, it's the late 70s, moustaches were plentiful and Sony released BetaMax. They blamed the failure on a lack of content. So when they and phillips championed the audio CD, they knew that they should do something, they bought a bunch of companies and created (eventually) Sony Records. That worked well. Really well, the profits were huge and by the late 90s sony records eclipsed sony electronics.

We now jump forward to the NetMD project coming online, the records division apparently were un-happy. So a bunch of restrictions were brought in, you could only transfer a song to the NetMD 3 times. That was your limit. The software and interface where buggy, so this became a problem if it crashed during the transfer.

A brilliant device was nobbled by the internal politics. I still say it wasn't until 8gb+ capacities became cheap, that any mp3 player surpassed it.

I would love to be able to provide some sources for this, I was told it by someone who contacted me after I'd stopped work on my util NetMDCalls [1] which was for helping people provide a FOSS alternative to sonic stage. I had a nice person explain that I was breaking the licensing of their software and to stop development on it, but because I was a minor they wouldn't do anything to me, sadly, my parents did not share my libertarian views and development stopped as my NetMD was confiscated.

[1] - http://www.0bytes.net/netmd/

Erm I think we are diving a bit deep into semantics. I guess it depends on why people talk about app count, is that due to press or their own way of understanding?

As a geek who uses the pretence he needs to evaluate all the platforms, I've iOS, Andriod, WP8, W8 devices. I have apps that I love which are only-on/muchbetter-on one platform. It is very hard to compare and contrast them. As much as I find my Lumia 1020 the most useful, and pleasurable to use device, I also have to have an Android or iOS tablet because of a must have app (SkyDemon if you are curious).

These shortcuts, comparing just the app count, provide a way of letting people summarise the complex underlying problem.

I think people have made a mistake bragging about 'app store numbers'.

When Windows Phone 7 first came along, a lot of the tech press liked to simply score the platforms by the number of apps.

Microsoft originally were pretty hot at stopping the 'free' or 'light' versions of apps being entered, as anything on their store can have a trail mode. From a usability perspective this is just great. However people would compare the app count against android, not discounting the android apps that were just trails etc.

So sadly, as long as people keep talking about app count, it is not in the interest of MS to cleanse it.

This is the point people often miss-understand when discussing different programming languages. Few languages prevent you doing anything. No one claims they do.

The point is some languages encourage you to do things correctly, others, make it an uphill struggle.

In otherwords slightly less than an Omega Seamaster? Which is 111g as per: http://www.pmwf.com/Watches/ARTICLES/TwoOmegaSeamaster/A%20r...

Or those who are flying in poor weather ('marginal VFR').

So many accidents read as the pilot really shouldn't have, but did anyway.

These can be greatly mitigated by ensuring that pilots stay current, for instance the clubs I belong to demand 6 monthly re-testing, rather than 2 years the license demands. Not to mention, if you don't fly for 4 weeks, you have to pass a mini re-test. In my clubs long history they have never lost a club plane or pilot.

Why focus on the NSA or the intelligence services.

The fact is that many private companies have this vast amount of data, the big push with mobile device advertising was the accuracy of the geo-location. The fact you can offer really well targeted adverts.

These companies build profiles on everyone, but unlike the intelligence services who have a mandate which as some level is for our own personal good, these companies have no such thing.

The concern is that we are embracing devices that provide little, no, or obfuscated control over personal privacy.

Depends what you mean by upgradability, my main dev and gaming rig is watercooled. It is so silent the only noise detectable is the spindle HDDs.

I can slam in another PCIe SSD RAID next year and hopefully get rid of those too.

The Mac Pro of course can't slam in a PCIe RAID, you have only thunderbolt, which isn't as fast as a 16 lane. You have no ability to choose graphics cards made by third parties, my box just has reference design ones, with ek blocks on them for the cooling. Of course this means changing the graphics card takes 1 hour, then letting it "leak test" in the bathroom for a night. I would still say it's upgradable, but clearly I've traded ease for silence and performance (you can generally get very reliable over clocks with such cooling).

This is why people complain it isn't upgradable. You can't easily put in anything you want, it has to go external, which is fine for some, but abhorrent for others. The options of what you can upgrade are entirely a single vendor lock-in. Some people dislike that. These people (such as myself) like to have a free market of competition and innovation on every component available.

Microsoft are much better than Apple at this, heck just look the latest fixed on connect.

http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/8...

I've had issues which I've posted in newsgroups and forums, that have been turned into bug tickets.

Some teams appear better at this than others mind.

Did you seed with EIES if you don't mind my asking?

(Always feels improper to ask such things)

Visual Studio 2013 lets me do this quite easily between my different machines.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn135229.aspx

One of the nice things about TFS is the whole shelving things, it doesn't pass the tests yet, but you want to switch machines, makes it a lot easier than having some personal branch / patch set etc.

>I don't know why you were voted down. Had I invested heavily in learning Silverlight a couple of years ago, I would find myself with my thumb squarely secured up my own ass.

Not really, as someone who specialised in WPF since it's latter beta stages, I still am finding plenty of work at a very good rate. Same thing goes with silverlight, even in a discontinued state, it still is going to have years and years of bug fixes. Just no new functionality.

The fact is, even today with all the frustrations I have with WPF been 'unfinished' it is still a lot more pleasurable than HTML/Knockout or something that tries to make HTML palatable.

A quick search in London on your favourite job site shows that learning WPF hasn't been a waste of time, my skills are not in a vacuum, I also have strong OOP skills, whilst knowing how to run software projects. Plus learning something is never bad. Obviously I wouldn't recommend someone learning it now. But compare it with whichever flavour of the month framework people are loving right now, people who've learn say Ruby on Rails aren't as fashionable as say Node.js is right now. But just do a quick jobs search in London and you'll see that you'd be better off on average doing WPF/Silverlight than RoR.

To be honest it's not a problem I have, I like to keep my comments short and punchy. If I'm writing war and peace, it will only ever be for the class comment at the top, for some reason I manually do my own line breaks then as I feel it can be used to break up thought and provide emphasis.

However, I'm also a GhostDoc fan: http://submain.com/products/ghostdoc.aspx So I appreciate some people consider me to be inherently evil/lazy.