We develop audio, video, lighting, and show control systems for themed entertainment. You'll find our equipment in the world's biggest theme parks, museums, and attractions.
We're looking for someone with general knowledge of Digital Video technology and Video Compression. RTOS/Embedded software experience is ideal.
It's amazing to see the things our creative customers do with our equipment, and it's exciting to work on next-generation tools and hardware to enable our customers to create the "next-big-thing". You'll wear a lot of hats(today I'm bouncing between debugging a PC application and working on an FPGA design), but your primary focus will be on our video products.
If you'd like to chat about it, my contact info is in my profile.
We develop audio, video, lighting, and show control systems for themed entertainment. You'll find our equipment in the world's biggest theme parks, museums, and attractions.
We're looking for someone with general knowledge of Digital Video technology and Video Compression. RTOS/Embedded software experience is ideal.
It's amazing to see the things our creative customers do with our equipment, and it's exciting to work on next-generation tools and hardware to enable our customers to create the "next-big-thing". You'll wear a lot of hats( today I'm bouncing between debugging an iPad app and working on an FPGA design), but your primary focus will be on our video products.
If you'd like to chat about it, my contact info is in my profile.
I agree with you that the banana plugs were an odd choice, but to be fair, none of the interfaces you listed would be found on a pair of speakers unless they were powered.
The 3.5mm jack would be common sense for a line out, but certainly not for the speaker-out from an amplifier.
The logical connector would be binding post, which allows banana connectors, bare wire, or lugs. As you mentioned, I'm sure these weren't used because of aesthetics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_post
I can't find where I read this, but I believe the reset line of the camera module is typically tied to the LED, so it can't be in a powered-on state without the LED being active.
It's interesting that First Officer Bonin is able to doom the plane by continuing to hold back on his joystick, even when that action isn't having positive results. Had the other first officer pushed his joystick forward, would the plane begin to dive? I assume that one joystick has precedence over the other...
It seems dangerous to have two joysticks, both capable of controlling the plane, that have no physical or simulated physical link. It means that one pilot could be attempting to control the plane and his actions will have no effect whatsoever if the other seat is panicking (as in this case).
Airbus' have priority override button which will allow the pilot not flying (PNF) to take command of the aircraft. In hydraulic or "direct" flight controls, both sticks move at the same rate, you need to be stronger than the other pilot. Normally the autopilot and flight control system would have the authority to override the pilot actions (common on A320 etc.) but not all planes have that feature.
In addtion, if the autopilot or flight control system goes from a fully 'in the loop' mode to a 'direct mode' where input=output (the transition possibly being caused by faulty airpseed sensors in this case), the automatic flight control mode has no more authority to interrupt pilot command.
In situations like you describe where two 'free' (no force feedback in relation to control surface force) joystics are used, it is better to have a 'pilot in control' switch otherwise you could get situations where an inexperienced pilot would panic and force his joystick to an unsafe position, overriding the more experienced pilot.
In all cockpits, there is usually a strongly defined system of who is currently in control. At one point you can see this happening - one of the pilots declares "I have control". In normal flying conditions, any time flight control passes over between pilots there should be a declaration along those lines. However, the reactions of the pilots in this situation don't seem to be entirely in line with what they should have been doing, which is a major contributing cause to the crash.
I am a pilot (a small one but instrument rated) - there's no time EVER that you want that, and I am shocked the Airbus does not have a warning that says DUAL INPUT BEING RECEIVED. At the very least, it should give priority to the left seat controls.
I think that part of the problem here is that the plane is so far out of trim and CRM has gone completely out of the window that psychologically at least the mental workload on the junior pilot has caused him to "freeze".
Far worse, imaging a situation where one of the control inputs fails; i.e. constantly produces nose up input. Can one of the inputs be suspended / turned off?
IAAP (not commercial) and that sounds like an awful way to do things. An important aspect of cockpit resource management is to know who is controlling the airplanes, and part of that is always positively verbally transferring control, with confirmation. "I have the plane." "You have the plane." There is no situation where you want two people to both have input at the same time.
IIRC, that was lesson 1, minute 2 (right after take-off). The previous commenter who said that wouldn't think to ask because it is akin to asking 'is the computer plugged in' is probably right (though the captain should have noticed it when he was observing).
Serious design flaw, and tragic human error with devastating results. :(
I'm actually mildly surprised that it waited until you were in the air. I always brief that before takeoff whenever I take another pilot along. But yes, very basic stuff in any case, and amazing that they were not following this standard procedure.
Same experience. Pre-flight briefing with instructor: "When I say 'I have the plane', do NOT fly the plane".
But then again, that's a VFR flight in decent weather. I'd imagine it's a bit easier to get stressed in the middle of the night in a storm over the Atlantic with electrical failures.
I think another major difference is that in most planes, you can feel when the other guy is screwing around with the controls because they're connected, so you can yell at him to stop doing whatever he's doing.
It seems to me that it would be worthwhile to fake this in a pure fly-by-wire environment. The added cost and weight of a force-feedback system on the control sticks should be minimal compared to the aircraft as a whole.
Wouldn't be surprised if that's one of the outcomes of this - you'll still have the ability to override the other stick, but you'll know you're overriding.
I guess it could be a cheap workaround to always get smooth transitions when changing pilot. Imagine if one pilot holds full left and the other full right and you press a "switch now!"-button. You would need some kind of transition-period of maybe a second to avoid jerk which could be confusing for the pilot to not know when he has full control and when he is in transition.
This is likely the reason, and probably not just as a cheap work around, in most day to day situations it's probably the desired effect since both sticks are independent and don't move in reaction to the other.
Actually if both sticks are actually linked, the person taking over will find his stick already full-left, and have to actually pull it over to the right as part of "taking over". Such simplicity and it would result in none of this insanity.
True. But, how would you want to handle the situation of two equally competent(at least in the eyes of the employer) co-pilots vying for control? should it always go to one? always go to the other? have a switch controlled? controlled by whom? not easy questions if you ask me.
edit: I actually can't think of a good way to do that other than have a manual switch on the console that would switch between the two controls. anything else seems amazingly bad.
When I read the headline I imagined that Cloudant was going to be pretty upset to see this on the front page of HN - but it looks like it was submitted by Cloudant themselves and links to their own press release!
If it must be done, this is the type of deal that you sweep under the rug and never talk about again, much less publicize on a site like HN.
I was always curious why he would wear such ill-fitting turtlenecks after he lost so much weight in his sickness. I guess his supply of turtlenecks had more of a personal story behind them and it wasn't as simple as ordering a size smaller from the local department store.
"Reason 10: Can Run Multiple Instances in Different Processes"
I'm not sure "open new window in a new process" really belongs in a windows menu. It's just more junk that only a tiny percentage of their users will understand.
I don't think the idea of a process is anywhere in the technical vocabulary of a typical windows user.
Worse than that tt's actually an option since windows 2000 and every windows version since then, so it's nothing new he just didn't know about it. Most of the other "power user" things like "open command prompt here" have been available through power toys or such.
How do you do that in Windows 7? It would actually be useful for me on occassion, but it never even crossed my mind that I could have a new window open up in a new explorer process.
The large percentage of users that don't know what a process is probably won't click on the right-arrow that takes you to that submenu. And if they accidentally do, they'll either hit escape, or maybe they'll google "open new window in new process" and teach themselves something.
User testing shows that non power users nearly always work in a single window anyway. They're unlikely to be confronted with the option at all.
One possible way of managing complexity is putting the complex parts where typical users won't need to go in the first place. The goal of the heat map work they do is to take the options that basic users know they need and set them right out front and center, so that they never need to dig into the rest of the interface and get lost in the rest of the options.
I wonder if the impending release of iMessage has something to do with this. With so much iPhone to iPhone messaging no longer counting towards text messaging, a lot of users would probably drop from the unlimited plan to the $10 plan - if it was still available.
This is the first I've heard of iMessage. Pretty much everyone I know has an iphone, so I think I'm going to be dropping down to the pay-as-you-go text plan once iOS 5 drops.
... which would seem to provide a $240/year incentive to just use iMessage, or twitter, or any IM system.
It seems that the right strategy for AT&T to pursue would be to follow the natural decline in the cost of these services by offering a better plan-- say $5 for 2,000 messages a month. As they lower the cost of an individual SMS, the usage should go up dramatically, and since SMS has network effects, this might slow the shift away from SMS as the messaging service of choice.
... which would seem to provide a $240/year incentive to just use iMessage, or twitter, or any IM system.
Assuming your conversation partners can keep tabs on what system to use. Your Android pals can't iMessage you, and using Google Talk or another IM service on an iPhone has always felt a little kludgy.
Sounds to me it's designed to drive you to one of two choices: either pay $20/month for a service you don't need, or cut it out altogether and pay 20c every time you get an SMS from someone who can't use iMessage/Twitter/Facebook messaging.
At 20c/message it doesn't take long before you end up paying as much or more than you would've been paying under an SMS plan.
When iOS 5 is released, I plan on keeping my current SMS plan for a month to measure how many text I send to non-iPhone users. I'll then downgrade my plan accordingly. My guess is that I'll end up cutting my plan entirely and just paying per text. The vase majority of the people I text with frequently are iPhone users.
It would be a great move by Apple to open the iMessage protocol so Android and other smart phone OS' could participate in the exchange. Unfortunately, my guess is that this won't happen as "free texts" represent a great benefit for switching to an iPhone and opening that network to other vendors would undercut their advantage.
Predication: ATT/Verizon drastically increases the cost of bandwidth on iPhone plans to make up for the cut. We'll see...
Hardware/Software Design Engineer
We develop audio, video, lighting, and show control systems for themed entertainment. You'll find our equipment in the world's biggest theme parks, museums, and attractions. We're looking for someone with general knowledge of Digital Video technology and Video Compression. RTOS/Embedded software experience is ideal.
It's amazing to see the things our creative customers do with our equipment, and it's exciting to work on next-generation tools and hardware to enable our customers to create the "next-big-thing". You'll wear a lot of hats(today I'm bouncing between debugging a PC application and working on an FPGA design), but your primary focus will be on our video products. If you'd like to chat about it, my contact info is in my profile.
For more details and to apply, you can check out the job listing on our website: http://alcorn.com/alcorn-mcbride-jobs/