A 24 hour flight powered exclusively using solar power – cool! See Solar-powered plane lands safely after 26-hour flight and Solar plane completes 24-hour flight.
Currently, the only gains that have been made in reducing the carbon costs of flight have been by increasing engine performance. I did read about an attempt involving Virgin Atlantic to mix aviation fuel with a small amount of bio-fuel, but I do not think that this ever went beyond the trial stage.
I wonder if this is the future of aviation!
Tags: Virgin
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I read an interesting article earlier in the week describing how Virgin Media has launched its new broadband service. This service will be available throughout the UK in the next six months, and it providers users with a maximum download speed of 50Mbps. This will make Virgin Media the fastest ISP in the UK.
More details about this can be read in Virgin unveils next-gen broadband.
The same article describes how BT is beginning a fibre to the cabinet trial that will provide users with speeds up to 40Mbps.
This is very interesting, because in the middle of 2007 I attended an event hosted by T-Com in Berlin. One of the topics at this event was broadband, and T-Com told us that it would have fibre to the cabinet deployed in the 50 largest cities in Germany in 2008. This would be capable of supplying 17 million homes. At that time T-Com had already installed fibre to the cabinet in the 26 largest cities in Germany, and we were shown some of the new cabinets on the streets in Berlin. It was then easy to spot these new cabinets ourselves, because they are slightly larger than the standard cabinets, and if you listen carefully you can hear the cooling equipment running inside them! T-Com were offering a triple play service of phone, television, and Internet to customers using this infrastructure. There were some BT representatives at the meeting also, and I recall them being impressed :o
Independently, it appears that Virgin Media will start traffic shaping P2P traffic next year according to Virgin Media to dump neutrality and target BitTorrent users. I wonder if the Net Neutrality war is being lost in Europe :|
Tags: BT, Germany, ISP, Net Neutrality, P2P, T-Com, Traffic Shaping, UK, Virgin
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The BBC are reporting that Microsoft stopped issuing new licences for Windows 3.11 at the beginning of the month in The end of an era – Windows 3.x. It is really hilarous to consider the hardware requirements for Windows 3.11 now:
- An 8086/8088 processor or better running at 10MHz
- 64KB of RAM
- 7MB of hard drive space
- A graphics card that supported CGA graphics or better
Apparently Qantas and Virgin Atlantic are powering their in-flight entertainment systems using Windows 3.11. I really wonder if they are powering more of their onboard embedded systems using Windows 3.11, and if this would cause people to be more cautious about flying with them!
I have not seen Windows 3.11 in use in a long time, but I do remember it fondly…
Tags: BBC, Microsoft, Qantas, Virgin, Windows 3.11
