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« Hydrogen Bonding Video | Main | PLoS Currents is expanding »

Technically speaking ...

Category: Technology
Posted on: September 2, 2010 12:45 PM, by Greg Laden

This is interesting: Drupal has released a new code of conduct for their community. It has five points:

* Be considerate
* Be respectful
* When we disagree, we consult others
* When we are unsure, we ask for help
* Step down considerately

The fucker stole the whole thing from Ubuntu, as it turns out. How dare they!!!!111eleventy!!!

Gmail just got like skype, sort of.

Five days after the announcement of Voice and Video Chat service in Gmail for Debian-based Linux distributions, Google unveiled a Gmail phone call service for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Rather than having both parties tied to their computers and logged into their Gmail accounts, one user can now call anyone in the US and Canada with telephone service. Google states that rates will remain free for the rest of the year and very low for international calls.

source

Aircraft Flight Recorder technology is hardly ever upgraded, and thus, will always be stagnant. Why is that? Why are the designers of something so important so conservative? Maybe they should be.

But really, there is no reason that when an airplane crashes, all the flight data has not already been downloaded as part of a continuous process using high speed networks and satellites. That would have been nice for Flight 447, oui?

Anyway, here's a story about black box upgrades.

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Comments

1

I was about to lecture you on how much more expensive it would be to set up continuous uploads because of the extra equipment required when I realized most of the equipment is already installed on modern aircraft.

The Spectrum article is interesting, but it would be considerably more expensive than the existing system. It's doable, for sure, but I question the value of making it continuous. I wonder if anything could be gained by compressing data in bursts at 5-, 10-, or even 30-second intervals.

Posted by: itzac | September 2, 2010 8:01 PM

2

I have tried the Google phone app and found it equivalent in quality to Skype. In other words, it depends considerably on network speed.

It certainly is cheaper for North American calls than Skype-out. 2.1 cents per min vs 0 cents. I'm saying free because we have to consider the Google tendency to track everything we do. There is a cost to everything.

Posted by: Canadian Curmudgeon | September 4, 2010 2:28 PM

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