Questions for you glass-panel folks

On Mar 6, 3:03 pm, Mxsmanic wrote:

It's a good idea, but it's hardly necessary. In the future, the basic stuff
will be skipped, especially for commercial pilots.

The Commercial ticket is about as basic as you get, Mr. Know-it-all.

It's a purely VFR practical with the emphasis on high proficiency on
all the basic maneuvers.

How in the world does what you say said square with what a "commercial
pilot" really is?

As an aside.. when I first saw the level of vitriol directed your way,
I thought, "No one is deserving of this treatment."

I was wrong.


Dan

On 2008-03-06, Jay Honeck wrote:
Yeah, but will the Lowrance and AvMap units integrate into a Garmin panel?
By "integrate" do you mean "talk to" the other units?

Yup.
--
Jay Maynard, K5ZC http://www.conmicro.com
http://jmaynard.livejournal.com http://www.tronguy.net
http://www.hercules-390.org (Yes, that's me!)
Buy Hercules stuff at http://www.cafepress.com/hercules-390

On Mar 7, 8:55*am, Mxsmanic wrote:
WingFlaps writes:
Well what do you expect? It's not a simulation but a game (and not
very good at that) in every repect.

It's a simulation, not a game. *The Garmin 430/530 are simulated by Reality XP
avionics in all details, and you can go directly from the simulation to the
real thing.

All details including the bugs?

Cheers

On Mar 7, 9:31*am, Rich Ahrens wrote:
Darkwing wrote:
The first computer I owned was a nightmare, it had no hard drive, you had to
load all the operating system with disks everytime you booted it up, most of
the commands were done in DOS. That pales in comparison to a new computer
with WinXP, but I wouldn't go back to what I used to have to do just because
it worked well at the time but I have always liked new technology, it keeps
me interested.

You had disks? Paper tape and punch cards were an advance - I remember
having to load the boot loader in machine code via the front panel
switches...

PDP11 or IBM360 perhaps?

Cheers!

On Mar 7, 9:43*am, "Darkwing" theducksmail"AT"yahoo.com wrote:
"Rich Ahrens" wrote in message

ouse.com...

Darkwing wrote:
The first computer I owned was a nightmare, it had no hard drive, you had
to load all the operating system with disks everytime you booted it up,
most of the commands were done in DOS. That pales in comparison to a new
computer with WinXP, but I wouldn't go back to what I used to have to do
just because it worked well at the time but I have always liked new
technology, it keeps me interested.

You had disks? Paper tape and punch cards were an advance - I remember
having to load the boot loader in machine code via the front panel
switches...

I'm just not that old! This was early 80's and it was state of the art at
the time, got it as a Christmas present as a kid.

Spoilt brat! I was only just about able to afford to build a simple
calculator from components (early 70's)!

Cheers

On Mar 7, 1:38*pm, Dan wrote:
On Mar 6, 3:06 pm, Mxsmanic wrote:

Modern debuggers make this largely unnecessary, and writing code carefully to
begin with greatly diminishes the need for debugging and the complexity of
doing so.

I am totally flabbergasted...

And here we were, writing code and actually charging our customers for
Unit testing, as well as component Integration and testing, when all
we need is one of them there modern debuggers!!!

Amazing!!!!

Aha I smell an embedded controller! Keep up the good work!

Cheers

On 2008-03-07, WingFlaps wrote:
You had disks? Paper tape and punch cards were an advance - I remember
having to load the boot loader in machine code via the front panel
switches...
PDP11 or IBM360 perhaps?

PDP-11, maybe. A 360 doesn't need a machine code boot loader; it's capable
of loading itself from any mass sotrage device it can read from without
having to resort to that. It does so by issuing a specially formatted I/O
command to the device that causes it to read the first bit of code needed to
load everything else. It's actually pretty elegant: all the operator needs
to do is enter the device address and push the IPL button.

(The Hercules to which my .signature refers is an open-source emulator for
IBM mainframes, including the 360. I'm the project manager.)
--
Jay Maynard, K5ZC http://www.conmicro.com
http://jmaynard.livejournal.com http://www.tronguy.net
http://www.hercules-390.org (Yes, that's me!)
Buy Hercules stuff at http://www.cafepress.com/hercules-390

Rich Ahrens writes:
Mxsmanic wrote:
xyzzy writes:

A better analogy would be requiring all new computer programmers to
learn assembler, which as far as I know they still do.
This has never been a requirement for computer programmers, with the
exception
of those who were actually training to write programs in assembly language.

Bull****. It was a requirement in my comp sci department for a
B.S. degree. And numerous other universities required it as well. That
was in the past, obviously. But any decent comp sci program still
requires, at the very least, a machine architecture course which
introduces students to some machine's instruction set, the assembler
language for it, and hopefully ties those constructs to a higher level
language like C.

When I TAed at Carnegie Mellon a few years ago, we were still
requiring students to write short assembly language programs, and be
able to debug and understand larger programs without any source code
being available... (In 15-213, if you want to look up the class.) I'm
pretty sure the same material is covered today.

Chris

"Jay Maynard" wrote in message
...
On 2008-03-07, WingFlaps wrote:
You had disks? Paper tape and punch cards were an advance - I remember
having to load the boot loader in machine code via the front panel
switches...
PDP11 or IBM360 perhaps?

PDP-11, maybe. A 360 doesn't need a machine code boot loader; it's capable
of loading itself from any mass sotrage device it can read from without
having to resort to that. It does so by issuing a specially formatted I/O
command to the device that causes it to read the first bit of code needed
to
load everything else. It's actually pretty elegant: all the operator needs
to do is enter the device address and push the IPL button.

(The Hercules to which my .signature refers is an open-source emulator for
IBM mainframes, including the 360. I'm the project manager.)
--
Jay Maynard, K5ZC http://www.conmicro.com
http://jmaynard.livejournal.com http://www.tronguy.net
http://www.hercules-390.org (Yes, that's me!)
Buy Hercules stuff at http://www.cafepress.com/hercules-390

Hey! Another assembler geek! I was a TPF/Assembler programmer up until a
few years ago!

On Wed, 5 Mar 2008 13:36:53 -0800 (PST), xyzzy
wrote:

On Mar 5, 1:05 pm, "Jay Honeck" wrote:
2. Assuming that it is, has the FAA considering a new, simplified
curriculum
for obtaining an IR in a glass cockpit?

Until there is zero possibility of things going tango-uniform, and you
ending up using the backup steam gauges, I seriously doubt the FAA will
reduce the requirements.

Simplifying doesn't necessarily mean a reduction in requirements. Rather, I
am wondering if they will change the required tests to more accurately
reflect the reality of flying a glass cockpit plane.

If I'm remembering correctly, the lion's share of the written test covered
VOR and NDB interpretation. After flying the G1000, it seems that testing a
student on his ability to chase needles on a VOR would be like requiring all
new computer programmers to learn Cobol.

A better analogy would be requiring all new computer programmers to
learn assembler, which as far as I know they still do. You still have
to learn the basics before you can learn the modern stuff.

Not that I know of. I earned my BS degree in CS (graduated in 90 and
*started* on my Masters) At that time Assembler was not required. OTOH
I took a course in microprocessor design and programming that was in
machine language. We had to use the Assembly Language "bingo Card" to
look up the code and then convert to Hex. We entered everything in
Hex (into volatile memory) and were expected to run the program, get
the proper results and exit gracefully. Then the instructor would run
it again.:-)) We even had to do addition by rotating left and right
in the registers and physically manipulate (write to and read from)
the stacks when doing procedure calls and returns. "GoTos" were not
allowed.

The final exam was a two parter. The first was 50 questions. 10 were
T&F, the rest either took calculations or an essay answer. The second
half was to write a fairly sizeable program in Assembler. I think it
took about 7 pages of instructions. Couple guys handed theirs in
while I was only about half done. I was almost ready to panic except I
found they had given up. Made it through the whole course only to
give up half way through the final exam.

That was one of the courses I aced.:-)) Let's not talk about
networks and calculating bandwidth for a given string at a given speed
though.:-)) Lots of Calculus there. In Grad school I took two
courses and taught 5 as a GA. The first was the Design and Analysis
of Algorithms while the second was Digital Image Processing. The
first was easy. We only went to 5 level simultaneous equations. By
the second week in the image processing we were already using Fourier
Analysis (Not FF) and from there is was all down hill.:-))
Fortunately A very good job offer came along about that time.

However with CS as in GPS you do have to crawl before you can walk.
they still start out with Pascal to teach "top down" and structure,
but move to C++ early on.
Roger Halstead (K8RI & ARRL life member)
(N833R, S# CD-2 Worlds oldest Debonair)
www.rogerhalstead.com