Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel: Questions, Answers, and Reflections
by
Patrick Smith
Published 6 May 2013
On its transatlantic flights, Turkish Airlines brings along a business class chef. It goes without saying, of course, that most folks aren’t riding around on expense accounts and haven’t got $9,000 to drop on a seat to Hong Kong. If it’s any consolation, economy class has its modern-day frills as well. Live TV, on-demand movies, and inflight Wi-Fi are among the common amenities. Some Asian and European carriers have switched to shell-style seats that, when reclined, slide forward rather than tip rearward, preserving space for the person behind you. And although complimentary meals are increasingly rare on shorter flights, buy-onboard options are affordable and often tasty.
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In addition to a seat that actually conforms to the shape of a human body, below are six things that ought to be standard in any economy class: Lumbar support. Existing seats lack any kind of lower-back cushioning. There is only a vacant space into which your lower back sinks, dragging down and contorting the rest of you. Inflight Wi-Fi and on-demand, in-seat video with a personal screen of at least nine inches. I’m lumping these together because they both capitalize on the strategy of distraction, and that’s what keeping passengers happy is all about. Browsing the Web or watching a movie are ideal time-killers. Five or ten dollars for Internet isn’t unreasonable, but it should be free in first or business.
The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership
by
Richard Branson
Published 8 Sep 2014
Other interesting, and more successful, brand marriages I’ve spotted are: Apple and Nike – who developed a wireless system that allows sneakers to talk to the owner’s iPod and record their activities; Audi and Leica – with a camera not a car; JBL and Nokia on matching smartphone and portable speakers; and perhaps most tempting of all the trio of HP, Google and GoGo the leading supplier of inflight WiFi systems to the world’s airlines, who hooked up to produce the very cool ‘Chromebook 11’ laptop, which among other things features complimentary in-flight WiFi on all GoGo-equipped airlines. This last one is a great example of the really smart upsides than can come from partnering with the right people. The free inflight GoGo offer (which usually costs between ten and fifteen dollars per trip) means that if you are a frequent flier you could recoup the entire price of the laptop (around $300) in as few as a dozen or so round-trip flights – clever stuff!
Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet
by
Andrew Blum
Published 28 May 2012
But what did that mean when the place I was coming home from was everywhere? The morning I left Oregon, I’d opened my laptop in the airport lounge to write some emails, read a few blog posts, and do the things I always do while sitting in front of the screen. Then, even more strangely, I did the same thing on the plane, paying the few bucks for the inflight Wi-Fi, flying above the earth but still connected to the grid. It was all one fluid expanse, the vast continent be damned—on the Internet’s own terms, at least. But I hadn’t traveled tens of thousands of miles, crossed oceans and continents, to believe that was the whole story. This may not have been the most arduous of journeys—the Internet settles in mostly pleasant places—but it was a journey nonetheless.
Python Network Programming Cookbook
by
M. Omar Faruque Sarker
Published 15 Feb 2014
If we choose technology as the category, you can get the latest news on technology, as shown in the following command: $ python 6_6_read_bbc_news_feed.py ==== Reading technology news feed from bbc.co.uk (2013-08-20 19:02:33.940014)==== Enter the type of news feed: Available options are: world, uk, health, sci-tech, business, technology News feed type:technology Xbox One courts indie developers http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23765453#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa Microsoft is to give away free Xbox One development kits to encourage independent developers to self-publish games for its forthcoming console. Fast in-flight wi-fi by early 2014 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23768536#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa Passengers on planes, trains and ships may soon be able to take advantage of high-speed wi-fi connections, says Ofcom. Anonymous 'hacks council website' http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-surrey-23772635#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa A Surrey council blames hackers Anonymous after references to a Guardian journalist's partner detained at Heathrow Airport appear on its website.
Industry 4.0: The Industrial Internet of Things
by
Alasdair Gilchrist
Published 27 Jun 2016
Yet, here is the strange thing—the designers, presumably with years to design and plan ahead, and with sufficient budget to issue contracts to perhaps redesign or reimagine required components, still ended up launching an airliner with multiple networks. The A380 launched with so-called state of the art infotainment systems, in so much as it supported IP and Ethernet for video, music and in-flight Wi-Fi. However, for the flight control systems it stayed with the traditional CAN bus as the physical topology as it was industry proven, a common interface, and even though its communication throughput was limited to 125-500Kbps that was sufficient, as performance was deterministic. However, the A380 also had a legacy bus network installed in the cockpit to support the VHF radio equipment.
Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX
by
Eric Berger
Published 2 Mar 2021
As director of propulsion for the mission, he felt pride that the rocket had lifted off, and eagerness at the prospect of going all the way to orbit the next time out. Hollman passed a couple of days on Omelek helping to clean up, organize the debris, and batten down the site until the next launch attempt. This left little time for internet browsing until he settled into a commercial flight from Honolulu to Los Angeles. Tapping into the plane’s rudimentary in-flight WiFi, Hollman remembers slowly loading news accounts of the failure. Eventually, he found some that suggested Musk blamed him and Thomas for failing to properly tighten the B-nut on the kerosene fuel line. It did not seem fair. There was no data to support the accusation. By the time his flight landed in Los Angeles, Hollman was pissed.
Risk: A User's Guide
by
Stanley McChrystal
and
Anna Butrico
Published 4 Oct 2021
Mitigation(s): FlyVA can work closely with its labor unions to ensure its workers are satisfied with wages, benefits, working hours and conditions, etc. RISK: FlyVA’s IT systems experience a major disruption. Source: IT Department Probability: High. FlyVA depends on a combination of its own IT network, as well as a variety of third-party vendors, to operate its kiosks, apps, in-flight wi-fi, etc. Networks may experience malfunctions due to natural disasters, computer viruses, and even hackers. Consequences: Serious disruptions in customer service, potential delays, and flight cancellations can occur if FlyVA’s systems experience disruption. FlyVA may also experience increased costs, compromise client-sensitive data, and lose its own data and revenue.
Among the Braves: Hope, Struggle, and Exile in the Battle for Hong Kong and the Future of Global Democracy
by
Shibani Mahtani
and
Timothy McLaughlin
Published 7 Nov 2023
A spokeswoman later nervously told us that the case was “very sensitive” and it was “hard to explain” why her department couldn’t say anything. The handouts felt like hush money. As the five boarded the plane, officials handed them back their phones for the first time since July 2020. Once airborne, they badgered Zebra to use his credit card so they could purchase in-flight WiFi. They wanted desperately to reconnect with the world. Turning on their phones for the first time, freshly powered up, came with a rush of joy. After scrolling through Instagram, Tommy spent the hours in the air running over and over in his head what he would say when he got the chance to call his family.
The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World
by
Brad Stone
Published 30 Jan 2017
The next morning, Michael and Kalanick left New York City for a Goldman Sachs conference in Las Vegas. Michael recalls walking the concourse at LaGuardia Airport with Kalanick and glancing up at a television in an airport lounge to see his picture on CNN. It all seemed surreal. On the plane, Michael and Kalanick sat side by side with their laptops connected to the in-flight Wi-Fi and watched as a torrent of anti-Uber Tweets rolled in reacting to Michael’s comments at the dinner. “I was literally trying to distract him,” Michael recalls. “I was thinking, Oh my God, I’m going to get fired before we land.” He had never blundered in such a public way before. At a previous point in his career, Kalanick might have gone to war with his online critics, defensively seeking to protect his beloved brand.
The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend
by
Rob Copeland
Published 7 Nov 2023
He was the founding editor in chief of Chief Investment Officer magazine, a quarterly that published specialized pieces for what could charitably be described as a limited audience. He was familiar with Bridgewater, in part because the hedge fund had helped get the magazine off the ground by paying it to publish some stories (“Risk Parity Consultant Views Survey, Sponsored by Bridgewater”). Using in-flight Wi-Fi, McDaniel shot off an email to a Bridgewater staffer. Would Dalio be interested in chatting for a piece that compared him to Steve Jobs? Before the plane was wheels down, McDaniel confirmed a three-hour, one-on-one interview with the founder of the world’s biggest hedge fund at his Manhattan town house.
The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
by
Robert J. Gordon
Published 12 Jan 2016
This has gone furthest for international travel, where on most airlines economy-class passengers can choose from a wide range of movie, audio, and game options, albeit from a small seat-back screen half or less the size of the screens showing the same entertainment options in premium classes. On domestic flights, options range from a variety of live TV options on Jet Blue and selected planes of several other airlines to no entertainment at all on Southwest. By 2014, inflight Wi-Fi had become available on most flights, although usage rates of less than 10 percent suggested that passengers did not consider Wi-Fi availability to be worth the trouble, at least for the prices charged. CONCLUSION This account of advances in transportation since 1940 provides a mixed assessment of the pace of progress.
Aerotropolis
by
John D. Kasarda
and
Greg Lindsay
Published 2 Jan 2009
Whereas Time magazine once grandly estimated that the advent of jets had shrunk the world by precisely 40 percent, today, it is said, the world is flat. And where air travel itself was once dizzyingly fast, now it’s too slow for our always-on selves. Ironically, aircraft cabins became the last refuge from our BlackBerrys before finally succumbing to in-flight WiFi last year. The reason we mourn that vanished era so is that the Jet Age was the all-too-brief flowering of our romance with speed. Later, we fell for seamlessness instead, spurning the freedom to go anywhere anytime for the ability to be nowhere all the time. We traded the clouds for the cloud, and we’re living in an Instant Age.