CNN posted a story today about efficient plane boarding. My wife sent me the story as I’m a frequent flyer and will clear over 100k miles this year. Right now, I’m jet lagged and interested just enough to write this article. I know its probably TL;DR; but if you find the original article at all interesting, I hope you’ll read to the end.
I see that most commentators and the original article are concentrating too heavily on the *time* to board a plane, rather than the pleasure of it and the customer satisfaction. As another mentioned, this proposed boarding method would separate families, that just won’t work.
The problem with eliminating overhead bags as suggested by commentors simply shifts the wait from boarding the plane to waiting for bags. Many of you may check bags anyway, in which case there will be only a marginal difference, but for those that only take that large carry-on, especially the frequent flyers, will be very displeased.
Also, most travelers seem not to realize how big those carry-ons are allowed to be. As frequently as I fly, I never see anyone bringing a bag larger than mine – which is the maximum size for the airlines I fly. For those that are checking bags anyway, the airlines could do more to encourage gate-checking luggage.
I’m not convinced that the way that boarding works now is all that bad. Frequent fliers get shuffled into the relevant set of pre-boarding classes which they enjoy as a privilege of paying so much money with the airline. They get to board first, or near-first, and don’t have to deal with other people and their bags. While I admit, when I do have to fly aft and without early boarding, the process can be irritating, but the process would be much worse if I had to check my bag or if boarding was random.
Random boarding suffers from the chaos described by the flight attendant. This limits the ability of flight attendants to assist passengers in the boarding process and may – again – separate families.
Here, I must instead agree with the airline. Make the land-side operations more comfortable. The only thing less comfortable than waiting at a gate with no seating while waiting for a delayed flight is having no seat selections for codeshare flights. Fix your codeshare seat selections, add more seats to the terminal, do a better job at informing your customers in the business/executive lounges as to the status of your flight so that customers may leave as late as possible. Improve mobile apps & communications so that those that are not sitting by the gate can get real-time status – including streaming of the PA announcements. These sorts of changes will make or break travel, not 3 minutes off the loading of a plane!
In the past month, the latest rage has been the bitcoin. It is a digital version of cash which may be used to make anonymous purchases online. You can buy and sell coins on an open market (this is trackable, by the way), or through mining. Mining is done through computing hashes, generally via a GPU.
Since last month, the Bitcoin has increased in value from $.80 to $35, and has since settled back down to about $19. This is a huge jump and lots of people made good money. Personally, I’m hopping on for the ride as I already have a lot of spare hardware, space, power, etc… all I need are GPUs.
Right now, the best GPUs are the Radeon cards, but they’re hard to get. The older 58xx series cards have been discontinued, thus hard to get and have risen in price due to high demand, but give a great bang for the buck. I bought a stack of HD5870 cards at twice their MSRP, and happy for it. Meanwhile, the 6990 cards provide the best performance (~600 MH/s) but are similarly difficult to get and expensive. Today, Newegg has a sale on the
XFX Radeon HD 6950 card, which at $200 is a steal compared to the bloated HD5870 prices for very similar performance.
Oh, and if your motherboard has only one PCIe-16 slot, don’t worry, because you mine on PCIe-1x slots. Also, as long as your motherboard doesn’t disable them, you can even use the slots that get covered by the large double-width card with the use of a PCI-E Express 4X Riser Card with Flexible Cable
In the coming year, we expect that we’ll also see a PCIe expansion chassis for Thunerbolt, which will bring higher performance mining to the Mac.
For a comprehensive review of bitcoin mining hardware, see the Mining Hardware Comparison from the good folks at bitcoin.it.
For the Cactus release, my first code contributions were released as fixes to Nova. These were around fixing what I phrased the “execvp problem”. Basically, Nova was potentially vulnerable to “Robert Drops Tables”-style command-injection attacks.
This was fixed by updating the utility method utils.execute to pass an array to subprocess.Popen rather than an ugly, kludged string. This also required fixing every call to utils.execute. A trivial, but tedious task.
To be honest, problems like this shouldn’t even surface. It is one thing to have security bugs and another to entirely ignore security conventions across hundreds of lines of code. It is fixed now, I’m happy, but we need to continue to approach our code with a security-focused mindset.
The next version of Nova needs improvements in the volume layer. In general and in regard to security. I’m already working on this issue and will be discussing proposals and potential changes with others in the OpenStack team over the coming weeks. I am, however, only one person. I haven’t looked at other parts of Nova enough to make any determinations in regard to their security.
I suggest that for Diablo, that we actively seek and resolve as many of the security issues we can find, because if we want OpenStack to be viable, it needs to be secure.
Throughout history, mankind has seen censorship. Since the Gutenberg, until recently, no censorship has been as vial and disgusting as that of burning books. This was the topic of a popular novel by Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451.
The past 20~30 years have revolutionized communications. Even our books are increasingly going digital. Instead, governments now seek to limit the flow of information over the internet. On the internet, a null route, or a route to 0.0.0.0, is the proverbial road to nowhere.
Just hours ago, the largest self-imposed nation-wide internet blackout has just occurred in Egypt. However, this is not the first time that the internet has been seen censorship, nor is the idea of a nation-wide blackout novel. A bill has been recently (re-)introduced in the US Senate that contains what many call, “The Internet Kill Switch”.
The actions in Egypt demonstrate why we cannot allow our government to have this power over our communications. The actions of countless regimes over the past centuries show why we should not allow governments to control, limit, and censor us.
Do not allow Fahrenheit 0.0.0.0 to happen to you.
Currently, Egyptians are staging a revolution. It is clear that our government is an ugly position of having financially supported Egyptian President Mubarak. Our support of this regime has been further substantiated through today’s statement by Vice President Biden that “I would not refer to him as a dictator.” (source: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Backchannels/2011/0127/Joe-Biden-says-Egypt-s-Mubarak-no-dictator-he-shouldn-t-step-down)
This evening, two major events have happened in Egypt which should receive firm and supportive US response. First, there has been a video from the Associated Press of a peaceful protester being shot by live ammunition. Secondly, there has since been a nation-wide Internet blackout. I feel that our country must denounce these actions.
Creating an iron curtain is not the action of a president that is “not a dictator”. I understand the necessity for both allies and stability in the Middle East; Yet, I cannot agree with our current policy of providing aid to Egypt’s current government in excess of 1.5 billion dollars per year.
Mr. Representative, I request that you speak out, both in the House and to the public, condemning the actions of the current Egyptian government. I request that you please seek an end to our financial support of this corrupt and failing government, an action that will be, more than anything, a symbolic gesture to the government that will succeed it. I strongly believe that we can help support a positive regime change by pledging to continue financial support to a newly formed, legitimate democratic republic.
We need more friends in the Middle East, we have far too many enemies. During this period of transition, please speak up so that we may make an ally of a new, democratic Egypt. If we fail to act, we may lose a vital opportunity.
Thank you for your time and consideration in reading my thoughts and concerns regarding this matter,
Eric Windisch