Welcome to my Blog. I hope to be posting here frequently and I hope you will check my blog regularly.
- Read more...
- 1 comment
- 985 views
Tom's Blog about all things simulation and then some!
Welcome to my Blog. I hope to be posting here frequently and I hope you will check my blog regularly.
Just prior to Christmas a small group of people representing various organizations in the flight sim community were invited by Microsoft to attend a meeting in Redmond, Washington. The purpose of this meeting was to preview Microsoft's most recent and soon to be released entre' into the "Flight Game" world; MS FLIGHT. We were given an entire day to view, operate, and ask questions of the leadership of the FLIGHT team, including Joshua Howard, the studio lead for this program.
Robert Whitwell, AVSIM Reviews Editor, and I attended. Microsoft has released more images, videos and a press release since then, all of which have driven the flight sim community to disappointment in some quarters, and elation in others.
As some of you may know, and it certainly was not a secret, the MS ACES team were talking to AVSIM, and presumably others, as early as 2007 about the emerging importance of social sites and the possible integration of a social site and flight simulation. Other questions asked had to do with the mechanics of AVSIM, how much bandwidth per month did we consume, how many files were downloaded in a day, median age, income, etc.
It was obvious then and glaringly apparent today, that Microsoft was considering an alternative model to the one that was employed with FSX and its predecessors. That model, in light of the growing expectations of MS management for improvements in revenue and margin, was not going to work for any future release of a product in the flight simulation genre'. The lack of profitability with FSX lead to the enevitable; the ACES Team were let go, with only a handful transferred to other sections of Microsoft. (I believe that there is one individual from the earlier ACES team that is on the FLIGHT team today.)
In a very short period of time a tremendous amount of experience and talent were lost. From that point forward, there were two things that influenced the path to a new flight simulater; the pressure to improve margins and the loss of many man-years of experience and talent. With the decision to produce a "Flight Game" a totally different set of dynamics came into play. One of these dynamics was the damaging loss of contact, in my opinion, with the flight simming community (that is another blog entry for another day however).
It is then no surprise that FLIGHT has a totally different business model and stategy behind it today. There are too many games that have far outshown the flight simulation genre' in terms of revenue and profit. There is no doubt that the MS team took a look at the Apple ITunes store and even some of MS' own products which have an online presence with downloadabe content. The the light bulb did light up. Control of the downloadable content (DLC), and the revenue that DLC would generate, increased the odds of satisfying executive expectations.
Summing up the business side of the FLIGHT product, it all makes sense and I applaud the FLIGHT Team Management for making a decision that flew in the face of their historic market, and the thousands of sim enthusiast who they knew would not be happy about it. It is a risky decision on many fronts, not just that of potentially alienating their history core customer base - you and me.
About the product itself... We were given an hour or two to "play" with FLIGHT, both standalone and in multiplayer mode. Focusing just on the flight model, graphics and frame rates, I have to say that FLIGHT was not bad at all, considering that you were limited to one relatively small part of the world. That may well have impacted frame rates as well. I saw no discernable stalls or hesitations thoughtout the period we were given to fly that sim.
I am not a Stearman pilot, and would not know the performance charateristics of one if they were enshrined in the POM and shoved down my throat. Having said that, I put the Stearman through what I considered to be a relatively challenging set of manuevers (or at least they would be considered so in FSX). The one that I will describe here was the loop. If you do not enter a loop correctly and depending on the aircraft you attempt it with, there are no limits as to what can happen. Power on stalls, inadvertent wing over, spins and all manner of fun things. I made three attempts to loop the Stearman and succeeded on the third go. The first two attempts resulted in pretty mushy stalls, as would be expected. In the third, I was able to finally get altitude and trade that for speed. Hitting the loop at speed did the trick and over the top we went. Keep in mind that this was flying soley with the mouse (my joystick wouldn't work for some reason) and it took some getting used to. Anyway, the loop "felt right". You tell me what a real Stearman "feels" like in a loop.
My point here is that the flight charateristics of the Stearman are significantly more realistic than the assessment that it is a game and aircraft dynamics and characteristics are modeled for that less demanding audience. If the Stearman is an example of the detailed flight models to come, then the picture is much prettier than some vocal community opinions would concede.
Over the last couple of weeks, more information has come to light on the sim. Some strategies that Microsoft will employ in bringing this product to market and growing it into a online enterprise has caused all manner of angst. A lot of this has been debated to the point of mindlessness in the forums. I will keep it simple.. The one thing that causes me concern among all others is the perceived, or in some cases actual, reluctance of third party suppliers to participate in Microsoft's approach to product acceptance, revenue sharing, and distribution restrictions, among others.
My personal opinion is that we need to give this aspect of FLIGHT a bit of time. Based on the initial success of FLIGHT and its early performance with the "target market", this will change. And that really sums up my feelings about FLIGHT today; give it time and wait and see...
But, there is one other aspect of this story that needs to be told...
There has been thousands of posts, or it seems like it, bewailing the demise of FSX and any successors that might appear. Of course that is not based on any real "fact" or "direct" knowledge of the subject. Nashing of teeth and arm waving are in my opinion, wasted energy at this point in the story of the Flight Simulation genre'. For those of you who are nashing your teeth, running around with your hair on fire and quickly damaging your shoulders, I have news for you...
In the meetings with Microsoft in December, the question of FSX's future was asked.. I can't remember the details of the answer, but I can sum it up by saying that MS has NOT SAID they are abandoning the product or ruling out a future successor. You can interpret that, anyway that you wish.
Over the last six months there have been a number of days that resulted in our community members pulling their hair, gnashing their teeth, and calling us (and me specifically) all kinds of names because of system outages, time outs, ad nauseam. I will be the first to admit that we have been struggling from time to time with the system. But, I am getting ahead of my self. Let me review a little history.
When we first setup AVSIM in our collocation service (known as a COLLO service), the architecture consisted of a single MySQL database. That serviced primarily the file library and was installed on JUPITER, our library and email server. When we brought online our new forum system in 2006 (the first generation of the one you see today), we decided to host it on a second server, MARS. But because we needed a MySQL database to run it on, and our previous forums were simply text based systems, we decided to simply connect the forum to our existing MySQL database on JUPITER. That worked for a long time; until the last six months to be exact. Seven years of successful service via an architecture that we did not anticipate would have a load placed on it that we see today.
Let's set that aside for a moment and address another issue. As I write this, over the last 24 hours, we have had over 670 spam attempts from one country alone, and not even one of the "biggies" in terms of spam sources. We have a number of functions in place that block spammers, including the service known as "Stop Forum Spam" or SFS for short. But, that doesn't prevent attempts to register - in order to block spam, we need to at least get a bit of information before they are blocked (email, IP, etc.). That takes server time to accomplish - server time that is taken away from you as a community member. Add all the spam attempts over a 24 hour period and that is a tremendous amount of server time being used to protect you and this community.
Okay, so, one more... if you look at the bottom of the main forum index page, you will see a breakdown of members and "guests" online. "Guests" take three or more forms. The first is that they are indeed users who have not registered or have not logged in and are here viewing the forums and its content. The second form of "guests" is that of search engine search attempts. Every time someone uses Bing or Google or any of the couple of other dozen search engines are used to find something that can be found on AVSIM, the system registers the search effort as a "guest" visiting AVSIM, which indeed it is.
The third form is that of "spiders" or "bots" that sweep through our servers looking for data to put in search databases, or for other, not so positive acts; like collecting email addresses and any personal information they can find. That process consumes huge amounts of server time and Apache connections - again stealing those from our legitimate members. There are hundreds of these and many of them are not "friendly" like Google and Bing are. The fact of the matter is that we have processes in place to prevent the bad bots from dragging the system to its knees. However, as in warfare, there are bots that masquerade themselves, use well thought out "spoofing" methods and successfully avoid or circumvent our protective measures.
Finally, there are features that we employ that do add significant load to our servers. Take TapaTalk as an example. It multiplies server load by 5 times! We have been working with TapaTalk on this, but if no solution is found, we might have to remove it entirely, and never look back again.
Now let's go back to the architecture... Because we rely upon one database between two servers, we have a bottle neck that exists between the two. That bottle neck is the interface required to go from MARS to JUPITER in order to connect the forum with the MySQL database server. In 2011, 12 and most of 2013, that was adequate. In fact, we rarely, if at all, suffered problems because of the single MySQL implementation. That has obviously changed. I guess you could say that we are suffering from our own success. We have out grown our configuration and we need to change it to prevent further "throttling" of performance for our registered community members.
So, how are we going to fix this? We are working to bring on MySQL experts and Linux / Server / Apache gurus to focus on the issues and we are daily taking remedial steps (like blocking all but a handful of guests at any one time) to make the AVSIM experience as positive as it can be for you.
It is our hope that your patience will withstand the time outs and outages, and that the outcome will be more than sufficient to make all these to be nightmares of the past.
Those changes I mentioned earlier are happening. In the last few days or so, we have added the new Classified Advertising system, reopened our Staff Galery, opened "Groups" and brought online our Blogs for staff. It has been rather busy around here. We encourage you to dip your toe in the water and take a look and put to use the ads system and groups system, and of course, pay our staff features as frequently as you can.
20 – What are some of the things you dislike in the AVSIM community, what do you wish would change, and what do you enjoy?
The AVSIM community today consists of over 152,000 members. That community writ large is a great positive force in our hobby. Our community is visited and listened to by every commercial provider and freeware contributor in the hobby (whether they want to admit it or not). I can’t possibly dislike anything about our community. It really comes down to individuals, not only in AVSIM, but in our hobby world-wide, that sometimes set my teeth on edge, so to speak.
I dislike the myth creators and perpetrators and those that have less than positive agendas when it comes to AVSIM. We have seen these “poison dwarfs” throughout our 18 year history. Some of the myths that have been created and perpetrated over the years:
AVSIM was founded by a company intent on taking over the world of flight simulation. What company? The one I worked for at the time of AVSIM’s founding? A marine electronics company? What interest would they have had in taking over the world of flight simulation? I really had to laugh at that one.
Tom Allensworth is getting rich from owning and running AVSIM. Really? I have never taken a cent from AVSIM other than to pay expenses for travel and lodging on behalf of AVSIM and its community. It is part of my hobby! In November of 2012, the Board of Directors voted to allow me to take a monthly “salary” from AVSIM, but that has never happened. I am a retired Director of a major U.S. company with a comfortable retirement income. I choose to turn all of AVSIM’s revenue into funds that pay the expenses of bandwidth, hardware, technical consultants, software acquisition and licensing fees. I do not need an additional income. Despite the facts, there are some out there that insist they know the “truth”. There was a guy out in Colorado that actually put together some wild assumptions about our revenue from advertising and donations and concluded that AVSIM was a very large income earner, as in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. I wished! I can state without hesitation that nothing can be further from the truth. Our monthly income today is less than our expenses. I wished we had the revenue that some of these folks accuse us of having. To prove that to yourself, just take a look at the Donations Tracker at the top menu to the right.
Tom Allensworth is a bully. Why? Because the staff and I won’t tolerate your entitled self and your self-described “right” to do as you please on AVSIM? If so, then we are guilty as charged. I just love it when someone spouts off about “Freedom of Speech” and our response when we correct those that really believe they can say anything, at any time, to anyone. Interestingly enough is that often those who accuse us of violating THEIR freedom of speech are those that come from countries that don’t have freedom of speech at all or it is very limited. Again, simply read our Terms of Service.
We are unfriendly to commercial entities in our hobby. Really? Tell that to the dozens of commercial entities that have their support forums on AVSIM. If you mean that we won’t allow you to deceive, mislead or otherwise squash criticism of your products on the AVSIM forums, then again, we are guilty as charged. I should publish someday the emails I and our team have received from some companies in regard to our handling of complaints about posts on AVSIM about their products. On one hand we are accused of denying freedom of speech and on the other, we are being told to deny freedom of speech.
And the list goes on.
The one thing that I would like to impress upon readers of this interview is that if you see or hear a rumor about AVSIM, before swallowing it whole, post a message in the forums and ask us about that rumor. We try to be as transparent as we can be, and if appropriate, we’ll provide candid facts rather than rumour in response.
21 – If you moved back in time to 1997…would you do it all again?
Of course.
22 –What does the family think of AVSIM?
I alluded to my “second best decision” in life earlier. My best decision in my life has been to marry my wife of now 24 years, Denise. She has been a rock for me and has suffered many lonely hours allowing me to work and support the health and wellbeing of AVSIM. The AVSIM community owes her far more than I could begin to describe. If anyone deserves to be paid by AVSIM, it is Denise.
23 - Where to now for Tom Allensworth?
As I said about Dale, the retired Marine Corps Colonel in the Peace Corps, the answer is simple; keep on keeping on. 18 years of my life (and those of many of our volunteers) are vested in this thing we call AVSIM. I suspect that they will have to pry the IP Board code from my cold dead hands…
So there you have it, the man behind the name, behind the Avsim pages and behind its name. The man behind the side of the hobby you enjoy. Is he right? wrong? I personally don't care, I am just glad he did what he did, glad he fought to bring back a website that serves so many people's hobby needs throughout the world, glad he got back up when everything seemed lost, and glad he provides with an outlet for my virtual aviation needs. The cost is....several hours of his retirement, and 100% of his passion.
I was having a PM conversation with a community member the other day, and it occurred to me that most people in our hobby do not equate their time and experience in the hobby to that of being a leader or having the opportunity to provide leadership.
Fred Xman has over 1,200 posts and his profile shows that he has been a member of the AVSIM forums for 7 years and that does not include his participation and contributions elsewhere. Question: Is Fred a leader in our hobby?
In order to answer that question we have to define the word "leadership". My simple definition of leadership in the context of our hobby is being able and willing to provide guidance and support to other members of our simming community, no matter the forum or location, AVSIM or otherwise. This, of course, is not the entire definition of leadership, nor is it the only one.
Let me give you an example of my definition in the context of our hobby. Sam Fman is a brand new user of flight sims and discovers resources and a forum at the Brand X web site. In looking through the forum, he notes members with high message counts and years of membership. I would be willing to bet that his initial assumption is that these people are those whom he can turn for help and reasonably expect to receive it.
Does providing expertise and knowledge in response to his question imbue leadership to the experienced community member? I argue that it does not happen automatically, that it certainly provides the opportunity to be so. I would argue that the experienced long time member most often does not recognize that opportunity and some even squander it by disparaging the question or the member entirely.
And what a shame that is... In my nearly 31 years of running public Bulletin Board Systems and now forums; communities if you will, I have seen countless thousands of wasted opportunities to provide leadership for some of the most immature and childish reasons. Self aggrandizement, misplaced self-importance, arrogance, condescension... and you get the idea. How often have we read the statement; "I am afraid to post a message there, cause I know I will be bashed"? Or, "Every time I post a message there I get slammed with responses that tell me to (RTFM, YOUR DUMB, THAT'S A STUPID QUESTION, GET MORE EXPERIENCE AND THEN COME BACK AND ASK, etc. You insert your favorite negative response). Or, the worst indictment; "I will not participate there, because the users are so hostile"...
There are any number of what I call the "entitled" that were significant personages in our hobby in days gone by. They are not around much any more because, among other reasons, they wore their welcome out across the hobby. These individual are the extreme example of squandered opportunities to show their leadership potential. Where they could have provided measureless experience and knowledge, they did more to drive members away than otherwise.
If you have time in the hobby and have shown your willingness to participate and share your experience via messages and contributions in our hobby, you have the leadership potential waiting for you to exercise it. But remember, being a leader comes with some responsibilities. Responsibilities like providing respect, maturity, thoughtful guidance, and so on. Ignore those responsibilities and you too will have squandered your opportunity to lead.
My point is simple; you may not see yourself as a leader, but the potential is there for you to nurture and provide if you so choose.
Today was somewhat of a tumultuous day for the AVSIM Forums. Truth be told, we were adding functionality to the forums and I blew something up. With the help of our resident geeks, we were able to recover and now things appear to be back to normal. There is some functionality that we had added earlier today that was wiped out, but those will be taken care of shortly.
The AVSIM FANCONS have been an annual event for a number of years, starting in 2002, with a large break taken from 2009 until 2013, when we did the FANCON in conjunction with Cockpit Fest at the Kansas Aviation Museum in Wichita in April. In-between we held a couple of social gatherings at our annual Board of Director's meetings in Chicago, Washington D.C., etc. Many of you have attended the FANCONS and our "socials" and we hope you enjoyed them.
It has always been a puzzle to me, frankly. Gatherings of simulation enthusiasts in Europe draw hundreds, if not thousands, of attendees and exhibitors number in the dozens. AVSIM FANCONS, with rare exception, drew hundreds of attendees (at most), and a handful of intrepid exhibitors. I can accept that maybe we were not doing something right; advertising, price, location, whatever. However, having experimented with locales as diverse as San Diego, Washington D.C., Seattle, Wichita, and so on, geography did not seem to make a difference. Cost of admission didn't seem to make a difference. Whatever the reason, U.S. based flight sim enthusiasts just didn't seem to want to attend in numbers that made holding a FANCON worthwhile, for either our exhibitors or AVSIM.
Given the small level of interest (relatively speaking) in the U.S., the cost to put on a FANCON, and the state of the economy, I don't see AVSIM doing a FANCON this year. In fact, I don't foresee another AVSIM FANCON happening again, at all. We are open to suggestions and insight about how to change this around.
As you might have noticed over the lead up to Christmas, we have been a bit busy here at AVSIM cleaning house and putting in place new features and small additions to the forums that we hope will make things easier for our members.
An example of that is the recent modification that we have added called "selective quotes". In the past, if you wanted to quote a forum message, you were forced to quote the entire message and then edit out the bits you did not wanted included in your message, or were not germain to your response. Selective quotes allows you to high light the pertinent text you want to quote, and then you click on the button for "Selective Quotes". It then puts that segment in your response without further editing.
I will be posting updates on what we are up to over the coming weeks. We are really excited about one expansion that we'll keep mum on for the moment.
Talking about things that AVSIM Staff are proud of, how many of you remember Denver, Colorado, United and the UA training facility there? How many were in attendance? It was a first of its kind for the simulation community. United, despite the heightened concerns about security resulting from 9/11, sold us over two hundred hours of full motion simulator time at a price that was, well, charitable. We only found out after the fact that the time they sold us was actually 20 percent of what they normally charged airlines other than United for the same access.
With that positive memory firmly in hand, we come to a very horrible, but uplifting time for AVSIM and a truly shining moment for the flight simulation community - the 2009 AVSIM Hack. I have hesitated to give more details until now, simply because AVSIM picked up and moved on, and I did not feel there was a need to do so. I have been scouraged by some in the community for not having done so (as in, we had something to hide) and I am reminded by my colleagues that in the interest of history, and long after we are gone, people will talk about this event and possibly see it as a water shed occurrence in our hobby. I don't know about that - you are welcome to draw your own conclusions.
In 2008, Matt Johnson, our tech manager and all around IT guy for AVSIM, made it known that his real world responsibilities would keep him from putting in the time that he had unstintingly provided for many years. He also told us that he could not guarantee that he would be around to help us out if things went "south". He was leaving the University environment in which he had worked from graduation, and going to work in the commercial world. The game play had significantly changed for him. Obviously, the responsible thing for us to do was to find a replacement for Matt, and do so rather quickly. I can tell you that replacing such a talent is not an easy thing to do, especially as a volunteer, which Matt was.
Our servers were getting long in the tooth, and our risk assessment of them was growing more ominous by the day. In fact, in the fall of 2008 a disk sector had gone bad. We took that as a ominous harbinger of things to come. What we did not know was the future role that bad disk sector would play... THE single most significant role in saving AVSIM.
In the latter part of the year, we brought aboard Stan Harmon as a paid consultant for his professional experience in Linux and its implementation. We asked John Binner, who was our hardware manager, to work with Stan to define a remediation plan for our existing hardware and operating systems. In early 2009, Phil Dawson appeared on the radar as a potential designer for what we hoped would become our new library. In January of 2009 he had opened his own IT business, SOURCEWISE LTD. in the UK, and was very much involved in the flight simulation community via his website; SIMFLY.EU. It was the SIMFLY website that established his credentials in our thinking and we invited him to join our team.
A lot was happening all at once. Microsoft had just announced the closure of the ACES Studio. The global community was in an uproar as to the future of flight simulation, and in the storm that surrounded of all of this, we were looking to both address our immediate hardware issues as well as set the stage for the redesign of AVSIM. Our first priority, in terms of design was the file library and we asked Phil to look at that. In the meantime, Stan and John were working out the hardware issues.
The shuttering of ACES precipitated a call for a meeting of industry to discuss the future of flight simulation and the direction that we should take given the demise of the MS Flight Simulation genre'. We decided upon a meeting to be held at a hotel adjacent to Schiphol airport in the Netherlands in April. Since I was going to be there, I decided to fly Dawson over from the UK to meet me to discuss the file library and its conceptual design. Phil agreed and met me at the hotel. Leading up to the meeting at Schiphol, we had given Phil moderator access to our forums, where he had also volunteered to help.
Phil and I discussed the library, what our larger vision of the library was, and what we had hoped to accomplish in its redesign. Phil returned to the UK and we went ahead with our meetings regarding the future of flight simulation.
The timeline from this point until the evening of the 12th of May gets a bit confusing, but here is the long and the short of it. Phil asked for increasing access to our servers to fulfill his role in the redesign of the library. He also volunteered to help us with the hardware issues we were having. We gave him the access that he argued successfully that he should have. That was a tremendous mistake of judgement that we would come to regret. In our defense, there were no indications that Phil could not be trusted. Who would expect a volunteer to have anything but honorable intentions? Well, we found out the hard way that not all volunteers are what they appear. That has had lasting implications.
In the day or two leading up to the hack, spam email had been sent from SIMFLY.EU to every member of the AVSIM forums. AVSIM members started reporting that the spam was hitting email addresses that they only used to access AVSIM. It didn't take much to conclude that Phil had taken advantage of his position and had stolen AVSIM's forum email database. Phil eventually admitted as such in the forums, after the hack.
On the evening (EST) of May 12th, we removed Phil's access to the admin functions of the forums and we started to shut down his access to the workings of our servers. Stan and I were both online, communicating, and watching the servers when we noticed that our directories were starting to disappear. We were not fast enough. At about 3 a.m. UK time (10 p.m. EST), Phil was attacking our servers and doing a data refill of our disks.
In an apparent fit of anger resulting from our removal of him from our forum administration, Phil went on a rampage, attempting to wipe out the entire AVSIM structure. He knew about our bad sector and our weakening disks. He apparently believed that he could get away with wiping out our system and blame our tottering architecture to cover his tracks. He had also set up a trip to Turkey which he was leaving for early on the 13th. He attempted to later use both as an alibi. The Turkish trip is substantiated in later court testimony. See the link below.
Phil was a smart guy, but not that smart. He had set an automated process to run which would delete disk sectors, fill them with "zeros" and effectively render them unrecoverable. What he did not anticipate was that the very disk sector that was bad and which we were all painfully aware of, would be his undoing. That bad disk sector caused his automated process to come to a screeching halt. When that happened, his process stopped short of destroying our access to the logs as well. As result, we had a log of everything that Phil had done, starting in the evening of the 12th Eastern Standard Time. His fingerprint, portrait, and genetics were all over the attempt to wipe us out. The logs told all.
Stan and I watched this unfold that night from our PC's in absolute shock. We could not shut down the process fast enough. Luckily, it hit the bad sector, died, and not known to us at that moment, we were saved. But we did not know that until much later. At approximately 2300 on the 12th of May, I sent out an email to the world stating that we had been hacked and that it appeared we were destroyed. Nothing we could see at that time indicated any possibility of reviving AVSIM. That was the worst moment in the history of AVSIM - and one that I was sure we would never recover from. Every indication was that we were dead. Phil had known enough about our system to also know of our backup server and he went after it too. From what we could see that night, AVSIM no longer existed.
It was not until after Stan made multiple trips to our Network Operating Center (NOC) in Northern Virginia, that we were able to really establish the amount of damage and our potential for recovery. Phil's ignorance of the impact of the dead sector set the stage for us to recover far more than we had ever hoped possible.
The following morning we set up a temporary forum elsewhere and started to provide forum services once again to our community. Almost immediately, the user community launched a donation effort. We were frankly surprised by that, and in short order we recognized that the community stood solidly behind AVSIM. As our understanding of the depth of the community's dedication to the AVSIM cause deepened, we opened a PayPal account to accept those donations. I think I can safely say that the AVSIM Team was astonished by both the community initiated donation effort and the results of that effort. The community raised well over $30,000 USD to help get all of AVSIM back online. To say that we were shocked and pleasently surprised by this still remains an understatement.
Our initial plan had been to effectively give into the hack, pick ourselves up, and wipe what remained of our existing disks clean and start over with the aged hardware then in place. As the community's contributions continued to grow, we reassessed that plan and decided that given we were able to recover data, and that we wanted to continue, grow, and extend our services to the community, it made sense to do our very best to put in place hardware and systems for the future. That's the plan we finally adopted and which you see the benefit of today.
As the tech team moved forward with getting our hardware and systems back online, we decided to pursue Phil for violating a number of UK and US laws and to recoup damages from him, both monetarily and otherwise. Those were inconsequential compared to our larger concern. The most important motivator for us was that Phil was attempting to sell himself as an IT guy who would set up and manage commerce systems for business owners in the UK and elsewhere. Given what he had done to us, the thought of Phil controlling the back end of commerce systems with access to financial and credit information was the last thing we wanted to see him get away with. We could not allow him to wreck havoc with an unsuspecting business owner and the customers that faced the potential of fraud. As a result, we hired a prominent international law firm, London based law firm K&L Gates LLP, and went after Dawson. K&L Gates also had U.S. offices that we could use if we decided to pursue U.S. prosecution.
I met with the London police in November of 2009 to provide data and a deposition which they would then hand over to the authorities in the appropriate jurisdiction. K&L Gates had numerous contacts with various departments and jurisdictions, including that of Phil's home town police. It became apparent that law enforcement in the UK did not consider this incident sufficient to prosecute, nor that the risk of fraud warranted pursuit. Given that realization, our choices were to spend enormous amounts of money to pursue a civil case against Dawson or file a U.S. complaint. Neither of these choices were guaranteed to succeed and would have cost well over 100,000 UKP ($180,000 or more at the time).
At the point that we shut K&L Gates down, we had spent over $10,000 of AVSIM's savings. We had not spent any of the community's contributions on the effort. Everything that the community had donated toward our recovery effort to that point had been spent on hardware, software and the consultation fees to get us up and running with the new hardware.
We decided that investing in the community was a better decision going forward and certainly a better use of AVSIM's funds. That decision was effectively made at the end of 2009 after my meeting with the London police and further consultations with K&L Gates. Our decision was that it would be far more beneficial to the community to put our money and that of the community's contributions to work directly, rather than pursuing a legal case that would do nothing to advance our hobby and accomplish nothing more than incurring futher expense.
Ultimately, the outcome was that we put into place multiple high performance servers with raid arrays, extrodinary amounts of RAM, and plenty of room for expansion. On Memorial Day a couple of weeks ago, John installed a high performance background backup system to further insure that anything short of an internal hack could rapidly be overcome.
This story was a tragedy on a number of levels. If you visited the Simfly.eu site link above, you will have seen a hint of what transpired with Phil. Without further comment, we will direct you to this link to conclude his part of the story: http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/9505178.Man_took_own_life_days_after_lover_was_busted/
I would like to pass on a couple of thoughts...
Phil was an impressive young guy. My meeting with him left me confident that he could do the job we were asking him to do, and I had no reason to question his integrity or sincerity. I was, and continue to be, stunned that he chose to do what he did. I cannot begin to tell you how frequently I have questioned my judgement in people then and since.
The greatest moment in AVSIM's history is and will remain the willingness, initiative and commitment by the flight simulation community to stand up and provide us the means and where-with-all to put AVSIM back together. It was a very humbling moment for all of us on the AVSIM team. We cannot begin to convey our thanks to all that contributed to our resurrection and those that have contributed since. Our gratitude is without bounds, and we cannot say thank you enough. Thank You!
The 15th anniversary retrospective will continue. Thanks for reading this one.
Richard Bach, 'Nothing by Chance,' 1963
This month we celebrate our 15th anniversary. I find it hard to believe that it is now 15 years since AVSIM was a downloadable monthly magazine. A lot of water has passed under this bridge and all of us on the AVSIM Staff are proud of this accomplishment and the many contributions that we have made to our hobby and our community. We take a look back now, and hope you will enjoy some of our retrospective.
Though my memory isn't quite what it used to be, I can still see those times and incidents within our hobby that are formative and which AVSIM had the opportunity to participate in and share. I would like to reminisce a bit, and hope you will bear with me (and the other members of our team who have contributed to this retrospective). If you remember some of these and would like to add your memories, or provide corrections, please add a comment and help fill the gaps.
The Microsoft FS2000 Boycott: Sometimes we get it right and sometimes we don't. In 1998 we launched a "boycott" of MSF2000. We felt that the boycott was justified as FS2000 really had some issues that MS should not have allowed to make it into the RTM. The community will probably argue for years whether that boycott was justified or not. All we know is that the next release corrected many of the issues found in 2000 and more. The law of unintended consequences... We had not intended to "make a name for ourselves" by instigating a boycott, but that appears to have been the result. The name "AVSIM" was considered language not used in front of children in Redmond, Washington for a number of years after.
The Papa Tango Affair: Some will argue the significance, or importance, of this phase of our collective history. I will argue that it was a very formative point in the history of flight simulation, and an event that still reverberates today (more later on that score). In short, Peter Tishma, AKA "Papa Tango", signed a contract with American Airlines and the UK carrier British Airways as well as Austria's Lauda Airlines for use of their logos on his products. Peter took those contracts and attempted to corner the market, so to speak, on every livery he had a contract on. Lauda, BA and AA were only the lead actors in this scheme - more were to follow. In short, Tishma argued that he had the rights to every logo that he had a contract with. Therefore, his "thinking" went on, he had control of the use of the logo within flight simulation. Take that to its logical conclusion, and Peter insisted that his contracts allowed him to "regulate" the use of those logos in freeware and anywhere else they were found in flight simulation. Imagine a PMDG not able to produce a Boeing Aircraft today, without prior approval (and a hefty fee we suspect) because PT had a contract with Boeing for its trademarked logo in flight simulation.
AVSIM called Peter's bluff. Peter had AA look into some sites (that shall remain nameless) and they in turn were sent letters of "cease and desist". AA and Lauda liveried files were being removed as fast as they could be found. Peter had managed to coerce some, via the law department at AA, to drop any possible competitive product (freeware or otherwise).
I was in Kuwait in April of 2001 (yeah, note the date and location) when I received an email from American Airline's lawyers asking to have a talk. This was in response to an AVSIM letter sent to those same lawyers questioning their sanity, in a manner of speaking... In a nutshell, they were told and ultimately understood the truth, and the PT affair became a nasty memory. Although a memory that refused to go away (more on that later).
Had PT succeeded, there would not be freeware as we know it today for liveries that were under his control. Any add-on that attempted to replicate a real world livery under control of PT would have had to been "vetted" and approved by PT. You can imagine, I am sure, that a commercial "charge" would have been applied for the privilege of having that logo approved. PT's sights were set on more than AA and Lauda.
Once that Pandora's box was open, you can also imagine that every commercial producer who had a logo contract would have been at least looking at, if not practicing the same.
I think that the PT affair and AVSIM's stand (alone I might add... other sites caved without even questioning the validity of PT's claims - a fact that I am particularly proud of) were water sheds in flight simulation's history. It could have altered our hobby for the bad. Forever.
Joe Jurecka, Jason Grooms, Marty Bochane and the Early Days of Online ATC: Many in our community are unaware of the history of the development of online ATC as we know it today. In the summer of 1997 and through the summer of 1998, AVSIM provided the first beta server in support of what were then Sqauwkbox and the ATC client that were the foundations for organizations that came later - specifically SATCO. SATCO spawned its rival IVAO. SATCO itself was replaced by VATSIM.
Joe Jurecka, Jason Grooms and Marty Bochane, names not too many recognize in the hobby today, are the grandfathers of all online ATC as you know it. A lot is owed to them by the many thousands that benefit from their handiwork today. Their collective contribution to our hobby with Squawkbox and the ATC client set the stage for many hundreds of sites and virtual airlines that were to come and still exist today.
From these beta trials and group gatherings on the AVSIM server, an organization evolved that was to be become SATCO - founded by Randy Whistler. The morphing of SATCO into an offshoot and then a replacement which was VATSIM is a history in-and-of itself, but suffice to say that AVSIM was there at the beginning and we are pretty proud of the role we played in nurturing the early development of this now very popular and important aspect of our hobby.
I would like to think that there are old timers around that remember "Friday Fright Nights" where IMC conditions were set server wide for flight into KORD (or anywhere else for that matter. Weather was a universal setting in those days). Those were certainly the good 'ol days...
The FLY Generation and Richard Harvey: Late in 1999 and early in 2000 there emerged an effort to develop an alternative to MSFS that caught our attention. This was the development by Terminal Reality of the flight simulator FLY!. This effort was lead by a gentlemen by the name of Richard Harvey. FLY was an attempt to take the visuals and the accuracy of flight far beyond what MSFS, Flight Unlimited and ProPilot had accomplished up to that time. One of the ground breaking aspects of FLY was the cockpits. Never before had simmers seen the fidelity of a cockpit as they saw in FLY. Today FLY is continuing in development in an open source environment and its future is solely the result of efforts by a small and dedicated team whose product evolves daily.
Behind every story is another that adds substance and meaning. FLY was no different. Richard Harvey was the lead of the FLY team and stands out in our collective history for a number of reasons. For years flight simulation enthusiasts had begged Microsoft to be more engaged with its customers. Don't just listen, but respond. Let us know that you are hearing what we are telling you. Recognize us as your customers and our suggestions, complaints and desire to be heard.
Richard took that message to heart and communicated with a vengeance! Through the AVSIM Forums, Richard became a part of and dedicated member of the global simulation community. He engaged with our members and heard them. He explained the whys and where for's of why Terminal Reality could or could not do something requested by a user. Richard set an example for everyone as to how a developer could and should be engaged with his customer base; before, after and between products.
We all know what happened in September of 2001. FLY was a serious product and circulating in the community. Richard and his team spent countless hours in the AVSIM FLY forum working though the kinks, user suggestions and all the while maintaining the gentlemanly demeanor that we had all come to know him and his team for. Known to only a small group at the time, Richard had suffered multiple rounds of cancer and treatments over the proceeding two years. In 2002, his cancer started to get the better of him.
We had scheduled a FANCON to be held in San Diego on September 14th, the Friday following the attacks. We naturally canceled that event for the year, and immediately scheduled our next FANCON for Reno / Lake Tahoe the following year, which would coincide with the Reno Air Races. As the time approached for FANCON Tahoe / Reno, we realized that having Richard in attendance would be a great thing to do for a great guy and for the community he so cherished. Richard and his wife, Tara, attended. We awarded Richard our first Lifetime Achievement award the night of our banquet. By the following spring, Richard had passed on, finally loosing the battle that he had fought so hard and long with. At our FANCON in Tahoe, with Richard and Tara present, AVSIM announced the college scholarship program in Richard's name.
[imgleft]http://www.avsim.com/tom/RichardHarvey_sm.jpg[/imgleft] The Richard Harvey Endowed Scholarship: The AVSIM team has never had a prouder moment than the day that we launched the RICHARD HARVEY Endowed Scholarship Award for college students attending Embry Riddle Aviation University. Our scholarship drive saw immediate contributions from hundreds in the community, including many of the commercial organizations that are still supporting our community today. As I write this, a scholarship award is made every fall to a deserving junior or senior at ERU. The scholarship has grown in value and is now self sustaining. It is indeed one of the prouder moments both for us on the AVSIM Team, and for the hundreds of community members who contributed to make that scholarship come to life and continue to live today. Every fall there is a recipient of the Richard Harvey Scholarship for Aviation, and in a way that pleased Richard very much, his name and legacy is continued. Some day, we hope to look back and find dozens, if not hundreds, of pilots and areonautical engineers who have benefited from and known the name, Richard Harvey.
TO BE CONTINUED
It came much faster than I had anticipated. At the ripe old age of 61, I am now retired. I woke up on Wednesday, February 2nd, a retired dude with no meetings, conferences, customers, or anyone or anything putting demands on me. Got up, fed the cats, and went back to bed. Amazing...
I suppose I will eventually adapt, but thinking of your "to do" list without a job to populate it takes a bit of getting used to. We'll see how long that lasts. I can certainly say that with four days of retirement under my belt as I write this, the hardest thing I will have to do is separate myself from whatever I am doing at the time and force myself to get up and walk or do something else physical. Sitting behind a computer (or worse, becoming an expert on day time soap operas) is a sure way to an early grave. And I am too early in my retirement for that to happen.
Anyway, I am looking forward to sharing this experience that many of you do.
Okay, on to the reason for this entry...
I think that anyone who has been in this hobby for any reasonable amount of time would agree that it has come a long - a very long - way. The positives in terms of growth of our hobby, the choice of alternative sims and the thousands of possible add ons, all bear witness to the dedication and perseverance of companies and individuals throughout the long evolution of this hobby.
In January of 2012, I wrote a blog entry here about the then soon to be released MS Flight product. In that blog entry I wrote regarding Microsoft's position on its historic role in the market;
December
With the decision to produce a "Flight Game" a totally different set of dynamics came into play. One of these dynamics was the damaging loss of contact, in my opinion, with the flight simming community...
I would now like to pick up on that thought and look at it in context of this industry and our community today.
Let me start by asking you a question; are communications today between the sim community and commercial providers in our hobby better than when you got into the hobby, or are they worse? Put your answer to that question in the comments section below and lets discuss it.
When I look back over the last 18 years or so and ruminate over that question, I see distinct phases that took place and then only with the benefit of time have they made any sense, at least to me. And, I will be the first to admit that this is somewhat a view that is from an AVSIM perspective.
PHASE 1:
Most certainly the early communications (or lack there of) was driven by the commercially sensitive Microsoft. Everyone else in the commercial side of flight simulation, with some exceptions, seemed to have adopted the same mindset, or more likely, Microsoft had them all under Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA's). Of course, that resulted in silent MS Clones around the world. Communication from that team were sparse and communications did take place, took place mostly with print media - certainly not web sites. Most of us knew from back channel communications that anyone from the FS team that dared to post in a public forum with anything but an alias and deny-ability would be drawn and quartered and never heard from again.
PHASE 2:
december
By 1999 Terminal Reality had launched FLY and communication within the hobby was about to change - in a very big way. Richard Harvey (pictured to the left), the FLY team lead, joined the forums and starting communicating directly with his customers. The earth shook, heads turned, questions from the commercial members of the hobby started to percolate and rambled about behind the scenes. After all, the Terminal Reality team was breaking the mold, throwing out the conventions of the day and actually daring to have a forum and post there and, with earth shifting impact, answer customer's questions. Publicly no less. The teams from Propilot and Flight Unlimited were increasingly visible in the forums as well.
PMDG had been in the forums too at this time and Rob and guys were very open with the community from the outset. So, I consider PMDG to be a significant part of the phase 2 opening of the lines of communications.
Phase 2 opened the doors to what was to become a relatively new era in flight simulation. The dialog between commercial providers and the flight simulation community started to dramatically improve and the effect could be felt.
PHASE 3:
Enter the new Microsoft FS team. In 2005 AVSIM held its conference and exhibition at the San Diego Aerospace Museum in Balboa Park. Michael Zyskowski (photo to the right), otherwise known as "Z"., the MSFS team "evangelist" at the time, attended and made a point of meeting with the AVSIM team. His message was pretty straightforward. There was to be a change in MS' approach to communicating with the community toward the better, but that it would be slow in coming. He was not kidding and the following year his promise of more openness was becoming true.
In 2006 we held the AVSIM Convention and Exhibition in Dulles, Virginia. MS had a whole team there and the event was a tremendous experience for all who were in attendance. Hal Bryan, Z, Brett Schnepf, and others from the team interacted with and circulated among the attendees. Their emphasis was what we now know as FSX today and they were very open to discussing it with the attendees, including a Key Note address by both Brett and Hal on the upcoming release.
To my knowledge, never before had MS revealed so much to so many in one place at one time. The relatively openness of the team to all attendees was pretty impressive. This level of communications would eventually lead to joint 2007 Microsoft DEVCON and AVSIM FANCON in Bellevue (Seattle), Washington.
For the first time in the hobby Microsoft held a Developer's Conference (DEVCON) followed immediately by AVSIM's FANCON at the same venue. The combination of the DEVCON and FANCON brought developers, Microsoft and the community together; a potent and very enlightening experience for all who were in attendance, I am sure.
Before it starts to sound as if all Microsoft communications and openness only took place at AVSIM events, let me dissuade you from that impression. From where I sat, evangelism had become a core tenet of the new ACES team. Evangelism meant reaching out to the community through whatever means seemed appropriate. AVSIM and many other entities in the hobby were in conversations with the team. Discussions that were comfortable and not encumbered with too many restrictions. As I alluded to above, this had a ripple effect.
That Microsoft openness was not to last...
In January of 2009, Microsoft shut down the ACES Studio and made an announcement on the FSInsider web site. 2008 of course is a year that we recognize today as the beginning of a serious recession that had a strong negative impact on just about every corner of the U.S. and global economies. It certainly was not a popular or well accepted decision by the flight simulation community. In mitigation, there were strong add on products to the FSX series of simulators and there were rumors of others coming. In dissolving the ACES studio, MS had abandoned its strategy behind the acquisition of the gaming studio in favor of turning to their own in-house Microsoft Games Studio.
PHASE 4:
The closing of the ACES Studio resulted in a unique event unfolding. Arnie Lee, President of ABACUS PUBLISHING (pictured to the left) was concerned enough that he suggested to companies and major web sites in the flight simulation genre that we should gather and spend a day or so discussing the future of the hobby, our industry, and how to mitigate the loss of ACES Studios.
As a result, a number of third party devs and a couple of major website owners were in attendance. We met at a hotel adjacent to Schiphol Airport over a weekend in April of 2009. I won't say that things were tense, but the group, almost to a man, were concerned about the closure and it's implications for their future business and direction. A full day of discussion took place, starting with a bit of marketing analysis and going through to alternative sim developments that the group was aware of. We left no better equipped to deal with the closing of the ACES STUDIOS, but at least we were talking. For a many of us that attended, that was a milestone in and of itself.
Never the less, the closure of ACES put a large pall over the entire community and it's industry participants. It couldn't get worse, could it? Answer? It sure could and did.
Enter Microsoft Games Studios... We knew from early in 2008 that MS was considering a "community" approach to its website, file hosting, community building and so on. Brett Schnepf had been scheduled to meet with some developers in Europe and he contacted me about my travel plans. I happened to be scheduled to be in London that week and he and I agreed to meet. We met at the White Hart Hotel in Hampton Wick, just across the Thames from Kingston. Though Brett was careful not to tell me what the "plan" was, it was obvious from his questions that the MS Management was looking into the "Socializing" of their brand. That is, a social media like environment tied into digital content delivery, including add ons. Over the coming months there was a number of questions and data gathering exercises, all pointing toward the "socialization" of the FS product line. The idea seemed to percolate through the first eight or nine months of 2008 and then things went silent on the subject. Here is the quote from the FSInsider page noted above:
V
We believe these future investments will push innovation, community, and collaboration to unprecedented levels and will provide more synergy with our ongoing investments in Games for Windows - LIVE as well as other Windows entertainment technologies.
With all the benefit of hindsight, this was a pretty accurate, though vague description of what was to come. After the closure of ACES in January, things got very quiet. Any communications with the Game Studio that developed were apparently under Non-Disclosure Agreements, which we knew a number of devs were restrained by. From the community perspective, the silence would be there until late 2011, when we and a small group of other individuals in the community were invited to meet with the FLIGHT lead manager and have a look at FLIGHT; the forthcoming MS replacement for FSX.
dece
In December of 2011 the group met with Joshua Howard (photo to the left), Studio Manager for the MS FLIGHT product. In March of 2012, not three months later, Joshua gave us an interview. In our meeting in December, Howard pretty well closed the door on dialog with the flight simulation community. In that interview in March, he essentially said it publicly. Here is the question and the response:
dece
December
TA: At our meeting in December, when asked about the existing “hard core” flight sim community’s probable negative reaction to FLIGHT, you indicated that you and your team anticipated that reaction and accepted it as an outcome of your decisions you adopted in your FLIGHT business model. Since then, have you altered your view as to the significance of the “hard core’s” reaction?
JH: We accepted that by doing something different with the franchise, we were going to upset some of our existing customers, but that’s the cost of trying something truly new. This new version has always been about finding a way to bring the joy of flight to massive new audiences, and we felt that we couldn’t best do that by building Flight Simulator 11. However, we believe deeply in the value of that underlying simulation, and invested a lot in Flight to create a more sophisticated simulation than we ever had before. (You can read the entire interview here)
With the closure of ACES the community was worried. With the advent of FLIGHT and the abandonment of the FS customer base for pursuit of the larger "masses", the community was furious. With the Game Studio's shuttering of the FLIGHT product development, the MSFS product was now presumably dead after decades of "presence" and a following by millions world-wide over all those years.
PHASE 5 - TODAY:
To put the history of this aspect of flight simulators into hard breaks, such as Phases as I have done, is probably a disservice to all that had been occurring in parallel with the machinations, drama and ultimately, the abandonment of the genre' by Microsoft. In the meantime other developments were taking place that have had, and will continue to have, a significant impact on our hobby. The communications have morphed considerably during the emergence of these other developments. Companies like Aerosoft, Lockheed, PMDG, Laminar Research and many other developers are increasingly engaged and their relationships community-wide were and are maturing.
One of the barriers to communications within our hobby has always been the polarization of enthusiasts along the lines of their favorite sim platform; FS vs. X-Plane, X-Plane vs. P3D, FS vs. P3D, etc. An important evolution is occurring; the evolving openness between sim enthusiasts despite sim selection. The previous two or three years have motivated enthusiasts to reach out and try the other major sims, even if only for a flight or two. But that cross platform participation seems to have "softened the edges" of communication between differing platform owners.
The story of "Today" is still being written of course, but it is tremendously encouraging to see the cross simulator dialog between users, the openness of Lockheed and Terminal Reality and the common understanding that our community is healthy, growing and busting with potential.