Everything posted by scott967
-
Pearl Harbor survivor Clarence "Bud" Lane passes
One of last 12 known survivors of 7 Dec 41 passed at 100. He was stationed on Ford Island during the attack as an aviation machinists mate. After the war he worked in the aviation industry. His obit quoted him: After retirement "[My] full time hobby now is still flying, only with Microsoft Flight Simulator". It said he enjoyed flying old navy aircraft in the sim. Internment will be in Cape Canaveral National Cemetery in Fla.
-
Cars that always/never break down.
Never had a car problem due to engine lubrication issues. Always something else. Worst was auto trans failing. Second worse was failed air bag computer. I guess turbo bearing lube can be an issue due to heat, not condition of the lube. Today your electronics will be the life-limiting factor on cars, not engine mechanical. Saw YT of a ford f-150 owner, $5k repair bill due to damage caused by water intrusion into one of the tail light assemblies. Wiped out a lot of electronics resulting in no-start condition. (The network was overloaded with false electronic noise that prevented the engine start circuitry from activating.)
-
Last Hawaiian Flight
Probably no one cares outside the islands, but our last local airline Hawaiian was bought out by Alaska months ago. This week, the last HAL flight was conducted as Hawaiian was placed under Alaska's operating certificate. All flights now are under Alaska's callsign as ASA/AS. Alaska grabbed the 787s Hawaiian had to expand their service at Seattle. No word on what might replace Hawaiian's 717 fleet used for the inter-island routes as those are long in the tooth.
-
A320 passes Boeing 737 as most-delivered jet in history
OK but McDonnell Douglas had the F-15 and F/A-18 production lines up and running. Given how the F-35 has turned out, not sure I would take Lockheed engineering over McDonnell Douglas. If anything Navy should keep the F/A-18 line open past 2027. Heck, We need bunch of F-15s for Mountain Home now, right?
-
New telephone technology.
On the older phones the dial unit was metal, rather thin. If you could afford to call long distance, your finger would get sore from the pressure on the return spring. Later we had a wall phone with a plastic dial that was easier to dial. We would sometimes use a pencil instead of a finger. We did a EE project where we built a device that would read the pulses on a dial phone, convert to digital, and displayed the number called. Using NAND gates, Schottky triggers etc on a bread board. Seemed real advanced at the time. Still remember the old number SUnset2-6402
-
India plane crash!
It seems pretty clear that the fuel switches were the cause of a lack of thrust and subsequent events. The report says they "transitioned" which suggests they physically moved, though I suppose it is possible the actual switches didn't move, but that an electrical control event, which appears identical to a physical movement, occurred. Either way they transitioned close in time, but apparently not at the exact time. We also know that the crew realized the switches were set to cutoff, but not if that was by observation or by reasoning from effect (alert? loss of thrust?) to cause. The evidence that a restart appears to have been attempted 10 secs later seems to suggest a physical movement of the switches from cutoff to run, negating the spurious electrical cause, though I guess there could be some some failure mode that would cause both switches electrically to signal cutoff, and then shortly later run. scott s. .
-
MS login and Honeycomb Alpha Yoke. FS2024
Thanks. Will note this if it ever happens again. scott s. .
-
MS login and Honeycomb Alpha Yoke. FS2024
Came across this thread after my Steam FS2020 came up with "login". (So I guess I lost all my settings?). I was wondering if it could be a controller issue as it seemed like I couldn't keep focus on the form input box. But I don't have an Alfa. My stuff is all old from FSX days. I didn't test unplugging all the controllers as I found if I copied my email / passwd to clipboard and started hitting ctrl-V over and over while clicking with mouse, eventually it would accept the input. Something MS should fix if it's still an issue in 2024. I run all my computers on local account users and rarely (like never) login to MS store (which I think works for xbox etc? At least the passwd I had worked).
-
Be careful with UPS and FS orders
Importing into the US, it used to be for me Royal Mail to USPS was always good. Even better when they upped de minimis from $200 to $800. DHL I never used but had a bad reputation. UPS/Fedex hit or miss. As "express" shipper my understanding is they might have to clear customs for the entire cargo load. So they would bill each individual recipient; not sure how they determined how much for each, but $50 as a general broker fee seemed common. I recently ordered a $30 car part from China. Haven't gotten it yet. Will have to see what happens. If they want another $50 will probably just blow it off.
-
India plane crash!
Don't know about "massive electrical failure" causing engines to "shut down". AFAIK, positive voltage must be applied to the fuel shut valves to close them. I guess maybe igniters would quit? But the engine fuel control should be powered off the engine accessory gearbox? Electrical problem needs to somehow affect both engines. Now I guess there are various sensors that are triggered/computer processing when aircraft transitions from "on ground" to "in air", though I guess some of these might be "locked out" initially. The one thing that kind of bothers me is the TCMA - Thrust Control Malfunction Accommodation. "Shouldn't" have anything to do with it, but until it can be positively eliminated on the fault tree...
-
India plane crash!
Good, because from what I've seen, the forward one has a dedicated battery power supply that's supposed to be good for 10 min (if electrical issues are in play here). But both "black boxes" essentially are monitoring the central data bus for both system data and digitized voice, so the data bus must be transmitting to get data.
-
Can't fly with only a Costco card.
Here in the US, I decline to allow TSA to photo my face, so I guess that puts me in the paranoid camp. In the US, the courts have upheld state "stop and identify" laws but these don't require a "card"; only that the person give his name. The US has a fourth Amendment. I guess you can waive your rights if you chose but I don't think we should just ignore it.
-
FAA Into the 21st century with technology.
Typical problem with mission critical system. You don't just swap out a floppy with a thumb drive until you prove that the USB interface is correctly implemented. Of course if your OS/hardware doesn't support the latest USB 3 spec then you have other things to work on. Then also the question of what file system to use on your removable media.
-
Delta plane crashes while landing in Toronto from Minneapoli
Well, according to the AP: "In a message posted to X late Monday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said fewer than 400 FAA employees were fired and “Zero air traffic controllers and critical safety personnel were let go.” A Transportation Department official told the AP earlier Monday that the agency has “retained employees who perform critical safety functions.” In a follow-up query the agency said they would have to look into whether the radar, landing and navigational aid workers affected were considered to handle critical safety functions." so I would say the facts, literal or otherwise have yet to be determined. The evidence at this point does not support a finding of fact to me anyway. scott s. .
-
Hotfix coming soon
Anandtech's been done for a month now scott s.
-
Boeing going and the fall of giants
I have kind of an interesting (well, to me anyway) background being Navy and having contracts with both McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed (at the time Lockheed Missiles & Space originally in Sunnyvale Ca but then they moved to Austin Tx). But after Lockheed merged, they moved that business line to King of Prussia PA, and most employees quit as Texans aren't really interested in moving to Penna. The McD folks were in St Louis, north of the Airport. We also had a separate contract with their factory in St Charles across the Missouri River. I retired before McD merged with Boeing, so don't know what happened to the St Louis people. In my day there were still F/A-18s being built in St Louis. scott s. .
-
Boeing going and the fall of giants
My father in law was an Eastman Kodak accountant. My wife of course grew up in Rochester which was for the most part a company town, though Bausch & Lomb and Polaroid were also important at one time. The WWII business, Eastman Chemical, was spun off and still is a going concern. They were instrumental in the atomic bomb building business in Oak Ridge Tenn. I can see Boeing being split up with the defense/space business going its own way. I can see the commercial aircraft business in Seattle going away, which unfortunately seems to be what the union wants. (I admit I am biased. My father was a foreman for Allis Chalmers, and IMO the UAW put them out of business. Now instead of workers in West Allis WI getting good skilled wages, the old shops are replaced with crappy retail where you can maybe make $12/hr selling.) scott s. .
-
URGENT - HELP - MSFS won't start - what do I do?
Never messed with UAC on recent windows. My general experience is when you have trouble copying files, it's due to who has ownership of the folder. You need ownership to set the permissions. The popup about "your organization" sounds like you are on pro/enterprise and there's something in group policy that's blocking. scott s. .
-
GSX v3.0.0 - Seated Passengers update
Well, that's got to be a pretty massive update! scott s. .
-
MSFS Adaptive LOD
I take it this is a fork of Fragtality 's DynamicLOD repo? Is the source available somewhere for this 3.5 ver? If it is including Fragality's software I think you are supposed to provide his/her copyright and MIT License with your mod, even if you are claiming some other copyright for your derivative work. scott s. .
-
Problem with resizing images from FSLTL for FPS saving
I don't recommend method 1 at all. You should only be downloading the official ms vcredist_x64.exe installer. That ms installer gets updates, so get a fresh one from ms. After installing in widows settings apps & features you should see it as Microsoft Visual C++ 2015-2022 (this is a fairly recent change -- I think along with Visual Studio 2022 which is the latest ms compiler for C projects). scott s. .
-
siatek good news?
I think can only help. Mad Catz not such a great fit with Saitek. scott s. .
-
Why Doesn't FSX Use Physical Memory?
Our modern windows OS has a subsystem called WOW64. From the viewpoint of FSX or other 32 bit apps, it appears that the program's interface to the OS (ntdll) is the same as on a 32 bit OS. But WOW64 allows the program's communication to the OS to pass seamlessly through to the full 64 bit OS which is what actually controls the memory management for the OS and all programs running on it. The memory manager for Win 7 and up is pretty sophisticated and in general trying to tweak it through various performance tweakers probably isn't going to accomplish much. As stated previously, physical memory that is not allocted to the OS or running programs is not "wasted"; it is allocated as a system cache. My understanding is that FSX makes large use of memory-mapped file I/O to access its data files. I believe (but can't prove this) that the "system cache" is probably holding a percentage of the files in (physical) memory, so when FSX needs to access them its just a matter of setting the memory locations rather than needing to actually do a disk-read. I'm not sure if it is possible to prove this using procmon or similar tools. I suspect a bigger problem for FSX is that it doesn't do its own memory (VAS) management very well and needs to do a better job of garbage collection, though probably the Steam version was tweaked in this area. scott s. .
-
Increased Noise at Reagan National
Well, I suppose Old Town Alexandria has gentrified and the current residents don't like the noise and have the political pull to do something about it. As far as the Fairfax pol complaining, not sure how really impacted Fairfax would be, Mount Vernon maybe, but not as bad as Fairfax under Dulles flight paths. scott s. .
-
Uninstallers. How safe are they.... and who checks them?
All of which points to why I like open source portable apps where the only "installer" needed is 7zip. Meanwhile I have had good success using IOBit as an uninstaller, but that thing is powerful and you need to watch it like a hawk because you could easily nuke your system. scott s. .