Super interesting that even a heavily consumer facing company like Kodak could employ thousands of people on large scale government projects. It definitely speaks to the scale of some of these projects.
The amount of money going towards advertisement for specific government bodies would explode. Maybe good for civics education, probably not good for the government's budget.
It feels like the S3 Team has managed to avoid chasing the marginal user with features. A great example of restraint. It does beg the question of whether the system could be improved in other areas like optimizations to reduce price.
I know e-ink has a nice look to it, but for a dashboard connected to a raspberry pi (that needs power anyways) is there any other reason not to use a cheaper LCD monitor instead?
You can shutdown the Pi between refresh cycles, too, but would probably need an external circuit to wake it up again. For microcontrollers, a capacitor and a resistor is usually enough.
But if you don’t care about the extra efficiency and don’t want to play with the technology, there is really not much left to justify the e-ink display.
I didn't quite understand how the screw being loose triggered the system, but the screw falling out completely would have been ok. Did I misunderstand that section?
It does not say "screw falling out completely would have been ok." The screw provided a single point of electrical contact for grounding. When it became loose (thus less surface area contact with the chassis and hence increased resistance in that part of the circuit) or fell out completely (zero surface area contact with chassis and hence infinite resistance in that part of the circuit) the current took a completely different path to the ground with catastrophic results.
I think this use of phrase "in fact" in the article is a bit Russian or otherwise Slavic. This usage shouldn't be illegal in English but is less common.
Electricity needs both positive and negative connections made between power source to equipment to work, but some old vehicles only ran the positive(sometimes only the negative) wires, and used the entire vehicle body the negative wire. Idea is that the electrons are gonna find its own way, the body's thick as it gets as a conductor, it's fine if you knew what you're doing, it saves lotta weight.
In this case, one of such connections to the body was secured with a screw, which could loosen from vibration, which `in fact` did. It instantly caused electricity to look for an alternative way, which was through propeller feathering switch and feathering relays, which caused the airplane to needlessly stop flying.
I think using "in fact" there is ok, I didn't have any trouble understanding it. "Actually" might have worked as well? And the part that follows, "with the grounding screw pulled out sufficiently far" probably also includes "the grounding screw missing completely".
Screw is forgotten or snapped: nothing is holding the wires, the resistance of ground connection is too high, switches either don't work or misbehave when you test them before flight. A lot of curse words about servicing the damn thing is heard.
Screw gets more and more loose (alternatively, dirt or rust accumulates): less and less current flows through the contact point, more and more voltage is applied to relays. Generally, it is not enough to switch them, until one day another bump changes the position of wires, and ads some more resistance…
If something fails, it should fail as a whole. It's analogous to aborting the program on unexpected error versus ignoring it and hoping that everything else generally works OK.
When the ground screw came loose the voltage coming out of the flap switch traveled back up the feathering ground, causing the system to think the feathering switch was activated.
When part of an electrical circuit starts to "float" like this - becoming no longer anchored to some global reference voltage (usually chassis ground is considered 0V) - the observed voltages in other parts of the system can take on really byzantine values.
Yes. It never said that the screw falling out would have been ok. The effect would have been the same where the flap ground connection would have found its way home via the feather system. Loose vs completely gone are just two points on a continuum of badness.
What is the incentive for someone to leave a review? Given that each person only has a handful of places they can review, you won't have serial reviewers like on other review sites.
I don’t know about where you live or what it’s like in the states where this site is presumably targeted but in Australia people would have ample opportunity to be serial reviewers.
The incentive is having some power over the landlord: treat me badly, you get a bad review. No idea why someone would write a good review, though. But bad reviews are more important. Landlords already have the benefit of the doubt.
I was surprised by how poorly it reproduces the look from the perspective of specific images. For example, see the magic schoolbus further down. It feels like their algorithm could probably be tuned more in the direction of "trust the images".
A huge part of art is distinguishing between what "feels" right and what would be the case in reality. Even in the spaces I usually work in-- 3D animaton and film-- things in the background or maybe out-of-focus in the foreground or whatever are often distorted and weirdly juxtaposed to make something that looks right even if it wouldn't map to a real-world configuration that makes sense. 2D art is even less tied to real-world representations than that. What we can see in applications like this is how incredible our brains are at conceptually constructing ideas based on relatively abstract representations, and how incredible artists are at operating in the less-defined realms of that space. Maybe a scene seems to have a coherent perspective to the viewer, but the couch and end table in the BG were drawn as they would look shot with a 120mm lens while the foreground is deliberately claustrophobic and drawn like it was shot with a 30mm lens? It could look fine to us because we don't need to reason about the realistic 3D space those characters exist in-- we just need to understand that they're in a space like that because we know what it's like to be in spaces, and how people interact with them-- good art gives us just enough to communicate the core ideas making them the focus of the message, and lets our brains subconsciously make the connections and add all of the context to make a complete 'experience.' Everything is a potential layer of communication to achieve deliberate artistic effect-- the type of couch and end table, the often skewed or exaggerated scale and relationships between objects, etc.-- and it often just doesn't have a coherent real-world representation. Beyond that, in any given shot, things are certainly moved around to aid in composition, emphasize certain interactions, etc. etc. etc. If you notice it, then it's a continuity problem. If you don't notice it, then job well done. In the overwhelming majority of cases, nobody notices it, and we just happen to have a world where everything from every angle has really compelling composition.
An algorithm that needs to look at the lines and try to figure out a real-world scenario that correlates to that representation might be trying to create something that could never exist in any coherent form.
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