My experience during corporate layoffs seems to lean toward letting the senior people go. Whether contractor or employee, doesn't matter. Twice I saw them ask 30+ year employees to retire and, when they said no, let them go within a week.
I'm using 2-factor authentication. Couldn't create an application password. Had to use my main pwd+token which is only good for 30 days. Shouldn't they allow the use of a 2-factor application password for an iOS app?
No, they shouldn't allow the use of an application password. Application password are a hack to get around the fact there are so many apps that rely on Google that don't support 2 factor authentication. This does add some benefits like one permanent password and the ability to revoke it, but that is at the expense of security. Eventually normal password + token is how all apps using a Google account should function at login, so of course a new Google made app will function this way.
I created an application password to use for the iPhone app. After I tried to authenticate it told me that I couldn't use application passwords and to use my normal password+token.
Worse yet, on my iPhone 3G I can't get the code from the Authenticator app and then log on to the Google+ app before it expires... it's just too slow :/
Only if Google increases their level of support. I work at a large business and we spoke with both Google and Microsoft. Though I'm a Google fanboy, I'll admit that the level of support from Microsoft is currently much better than Google. Microsoft's cost of implementation was also lower.
The larger the business gets the more of a concern bandwidth becomes. All web based applications suffer from this problem, the very high cost of bandwidth in the US.
Without very competitive high bandwidth costs, i just don't see how business software, much less, enterprise software, could ever really be worth the investment on the web.
I forward my google account to my google apps. My main issue is that all my contacts are neatly organized in google apps and it's hard to use services like Google+ or Google Voice when they pull contacts from my gmail account.
For me the reason is integration: Calendar invites, Google Docs "shares", and other permissions grants don't forward, so they always end up tied to the Google Apps account. Which means using it as a primary account, gives one a better more integrated experience.
I used to forward from my Google Apps account to regular GMail but different people would see my email address from my domain and others from gmail.com depending on their mail client.
It's a minor nuisance but switching it around and routing everything to my apps account solved that inconsistency.
It's been a while but I believe when using the "Send mail as" feature in gmail it puts your preferred address in the from: field but keeps your gmail address in the sender: field.
That's probably fine in most cases but I was getting inconsistent results when people replied to my emails. Some were addressed to my domain and others to my gmail address.
I was also concerned that this might give me a slightly higher perceived risk in some SPAM filters.
Like I said earlier, none of this was a huge deal. It was just one of those inconsistencies that led me to routing all my mail to Google Apps.
"...there will be room for a computer override of sorts to stop amateur pilots tipping over"
I don't know. I still think there's too much of a risk in the whole thing being top heavy due to the blades being below the rider. Envisioning being at 5,000 ft. and all of the sudden looking at the world upside down while rocketing to the ground.
Having the center of mass under the blades is fundamental to helicopter stability. There's no mention of how he made this bike stable. I'm guessing, he didn't. Thinks he can work out the bugs by testing. It will work as well as software that's been 'tested to correctness' - after a lot of crashes and hacks, it will limp along.
This is only true for teetering rotor heads (eg: Bell, Robinson) where the fuselage hangs freely by the mast from the centre of the rotor disk. (Under -ve G the rotor and fuselage don't stay nicely aligned, and mast bumping happens - not good).
If there is a rigid/semirigid rotor head like on models, then there is no problem having the center of mass above the rotor. I have sometimes found models to be more stable and perform better when flying inverted.
For soemthing like this 'bike' - the thrust vector rotates with the vehicle - it will stay lined up with the CoG. Like rockets - it may appear unstable to have the motor at the bottom, but it is actually stable.
Most high-performance combat aircraft these days are rather aerodynamically unstable and only stay in the air because their computers are constantly correcting, and they do it all with thirty-year-old technology. Plus, remember those quadrotor drones. This thing will only crash if its computer does, and the government is going to force them to make their software so bulletproof that that's not going to happen.
…and by the time that software is so bulletproof, this technology will be 30 years old, too.
That is a bit of an exaggeration, but with modern designs, you need wind tunnel data, you have to program a simulator, so that you can test control software without crashing a zillion expensive hardware systems, you need ejection seats and an array of test pilots trained in a flight simulator that behaves exactly like the hardware is thought to behave, etc.
The advantage here is that you could program the software so that it always stays far, far away from danger zones. With fighter aircraft, that is not an option. However, if you do that, the thing will not sell.
True, but this is also several orders of magnitude simpler than a modern combat aircraft. It has vastly simpler dynamics, it doesn't have to deal with control surfaces, it doesn't have to be stable with irregular patches of supersonic flow on its wings, and so on. It'll probably only take three or six years, I bet.
How does it work - can both rotors be adjusted by computer? In which dimensions?
Just wondering if it would be an interesting project to try to create a drone with two rotors instead of the current crop with four. Might be a nice playground for genetic algorithms.
Then again, of course there are already helicopters. Why do these drones need four rotors anyway? Because it is that much easier to stabilize?
The rotors are fixed. My guess with this is that each fan has a blade running forward and backward underneath it that can be rotated by a computer (thrust vectoring: [1]). You can exert a torque on the vehicle by pushing some of the thrust to the left or right instead of straight down. You can exert a torque forward or backward by adjusting the power going to the forward and backward rotors. So, turning left means vectoring forward thrust to the right and vectoring backward thrust to to the left, giving you a net CCW torque. Sliding left means vectoring both thrusts to the right, accelerating you sideways. Forward and backward are handled by increasing and decreasing power to the fans.
The quadrotor drones are easier to control than helicopters because they don't need any control surfaces at all. You can exert a torque in any direction by adjusting the power to the rotors. Need to go forward? More power to the back, less power in front; the front of the drone dips and the thing drifts forward. Controlling the power to each engine is trivial and the dynamics are easy, so the math is pretty easy to do.
