chuckp
Right now you can not legally fly a "drone" commercially, all flight by multirotor UAS over US soil is classified as hobby, educational, or government right now. That is where 2015 comes in, the FAA is suppose to make a ruling dictating commercial flight regulations and processes. (http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-02/under-newly...)
Currently two vehicles have been certified for flight but they are in a ~20k price range. The estimates on this vehicle are very reasonable for technological advances in the next two years. The opensource community has already created the software technology and a multirotor device of this size could conceivably run for 30min especially with advances is battery and motor/prop technologies.
Perhaps Amazon wants to attempt to shift America's focus on drones, and how they can have positive effects on our lives. Sounds like a good plan especially if they are able to provide emergency supplies to remote locations, or just get us use to them assisting in daily activities.
Wonder what it costs to charge ~15000mah battery vs the driving cost.
Updates on Status page:
Identified - The errors are a result of some routine file system maintenance that affected our front-end machines. We are resolving the issue on each machine and will keep this page updated with our progress. We hope to have everything back in working order very shortly. 14:04 UTC
Investigating - We're experiencing slow loading times and outages for some customers loading the site pages or cloning. We're looking into it and will update once we have more information. 13:58 UTC
Though I am having issues pushing and pulling which doesn't cover cloning or the UI.
Back then I could say we are about 75% back and give a full description of the issue in laymans terms which usually curbed the anxieties. Today I basically pointed them to the status page saying that this is all I have to work with. In my experience Google's support has been pretty bad but that is because most of the time their products work well, but yea I feel in the dark when something like this occurs. Still their uptime has been better than having that "oh shit" moment because a DC is degraded.
In the end, everyone could still access the email and nothing was lost.
That is a HUGE change from 0.024% this has been changed from a "Service disruption" to a "Service outage".
Also, not sure if it is dependent on your Google login, but mine are all in EST.
At least with my cloud servers if there is an issue I at least get an idea of what is going on or an expectation of resolution. Google... what is really going on that an issue remains unresolved for 3-4hrs impacting paying users.
I do agree a "person to blame" field was obviously implemented by a "management only" oriented person to probably cover his/her own ass. Essentially this is a scorecard to give to his higher-ups to say "Hey look Bob is the one with all the issues, no me".
Rackspace CloudFiles Offline
Not sure if this is localized to just CloudFiles but their portal logins are offline for Cloud resources, and the API calls are not functioning (giving authentication errors).Been offline for about 10 minutes now and confirmed on the phone services were offline and technicians were aware.Anyone else having issues?Wondering about CloudServers...
Arduino based satellite on Kickstarter with spectrometer
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/575960623/ardusat-your-arduino-experiment-in-space
The project appears to be setup by employees of "NASA Ames Research Center working on alternative methods of public outreach for space science" which sounds pretty authentic.Discover magazine is putting up a $1500 prize to the best application designed to run on this project.Finally this project also announces a company producing an arduino spectrometer shield, which may be more exciting than...
You still have to implement in app load balancing but this is easy via Hook.io, by the same group.
Be it a customer service rep, or a software engineer, when the employer says "Do X" if you don't know how to do it, figure it out. So many people will just sit there and stare into their screen or at a wall. That is the type of person these tests are designed to weed out.
As others pointed out, if you are not willing to put in the effort and jump through the hoops, why bother, either you feel your too good for the job and won't apply yourself, or you lack the basic understanding of problem solving and troubleshooting.