inflight wifi

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pages: 309 words: 100,573

Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel: Questions, Answers, and Reflections by Patrick Smith

Airbus A320, airline deregulation, airport security, Atul Gawande, Boeing 747, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, collective bargaining, crew resource management, D. B. Cooper, high-speed rail, inflight wifi, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, legacy carrier, low cost airline, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, pattern recognition, race to the bottom, Skype, Tenerife airport disaster, US Airways Flight 1549, zero-sum game

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.

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.


pages: 315 words: 99,065

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership by Richard Branson

barriers to entry, Boeing 747, call centre, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, clean water, collective bargaining, Costa Concordia, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, flag carrier, friendly fire, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, index card, inflight wifi, Lao Tzu, legacy carrier, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, work culture , zero-sum game

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!


pages: 314 words: 83,631

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum

air freight, cable laying ship, call centre, digital divide, Donald Davies, global village, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, if you build it, they will come, inflight wifi, invisible hand, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, messenger bag, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, packet switching, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, satellite internet, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, undersea cable, urban planning, UUNET, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

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.


pages: 234 words: 57,267

Python Network Programming Cookbook by M. Omar Faruque Sarker

business intelligence, cloud computing, Debian, DevOps, Firefox, inflight wifi, machine readable, RFID, web application

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

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air gap, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, business intelligence, business logic, business process, chief data officer, cloud computing, connected car, cyber-physical system, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, DevOps, digital twin, fault tolerance, fulfillment center, global value chain, Google Glasses, hiring and firing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, microservices, millennium bug, OSI model, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, platform as a service, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RFID, Salesforce, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, smart transportation, software as a service, stealth mode startup, supply-chain management, The future is already here, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, web application, WebRTC, Y2K

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.


pages: 304 words: 89,879

Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX by Eric Berger

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", 3D printing, Apollo 11, Boeing 747, Colonization of Mars, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fear of failure, inflight wifi, intermodal, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Mercator projection, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Palm Treo, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, side project, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, Tesla Model S, Virgin Galactic

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.


pages: 489 words: 106,008

Risk: A User's Guide by Stanley McChrystal, Anna Butrico

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, fear of failure, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Googley, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, inflight wifi, invisible hand, iterative process, late fees, lockdown, Paul Buchheit, Ponzi scheme, QWERTY keyboard, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, source of truth, Stanislav Petrov, Steve Jobs, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, wikimedia commons, work culture

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.


pages: 373 words: 112,822

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World by Brad Stone

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Boris Johnson, Burning Man, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collaborative consumption, data science, Didi Chuxing, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, East Village, fake it until you make it, fixed income, gentrification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, inflight wifi, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Necker cube, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, race to the bottom, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

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.


pages: 1,104 words: 302,176

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

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

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.


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

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.